A good night’s sleep is very important to me. I eat bad, I drink bad, I couldn’t tell you the last time I switched out my contacts, but despite all the bad things I do, I always make time for sleep. Non-negotiable. You don’t sleep and you’re opening yourself up for a world of problems. And if you’re a person like me, if you don’t sleep, you won’t excel at doing all the other dumb things you do.
When I got married we had an older queen size mattress. I figured since we upgraded our relationship it was time to upgrade our mattress. The search began. We to went mattress store after mattress store laying on these things like we were picking out a coffin. Soft. Firm. How would I know what I like? I had never considered it. After laying on a hundred different mattresses we finally settled on one we both liked. I thought.
All these mattresses have the same type of names. Comfort Plus. Beauty Rest. Comfort Rest. Simply Sleep. Simply Rest. Beauty Comfort Plus Sleep Rest Simply. It’s about as unnerving as paint color names. All this to say that when this beautiful new mattress finally arrived at our house we had no idea if it was the right one or not. We put this thing in the bedroom and laid down on it for the first time. It felt soft but maybe that’s how it was supposed to feel. I couldn’t remember it from the hundred other Comfort Plus Rest Beauty Sleep’s we laid on the week before.
As time went on I noticed I wasn’t sleeping that well. Neither was my wife. But it couldn’t be because of the mattress. We paid a fortune for that thing. Months passed. About a year later I am reading a book and look over to say something to my wife and I can only see the tip of her nose...because she had sunk. Maybe we need to turn the mattress. Maybe we need to flip it. We lived with this thing for another few years before it got to the point where I wasn’t only sleeping but I noticed my biceps were getting more tone. Not because I had been working out, but because every morning getting out of bed was harder than if I fell into a quicksand pit in the everglades and an alligator was rushing towards me.
We decided it was time to retire this disappointment and went on the search for a new mattress. This time with a notepad and the knowledge we would avoid anything with the words soft, fluffy, or cloud in it, and only try out firm, extra firm, and superfirm. We tested these things out like we were tasting a fine wine. Comparing tasting notes and comfort bouquets. Finally, we found a mattress that was exactly what we wanted. A very expensive brick. They even threw in a new set of box springs! Not as tall as our current springs but whatever. Free is free. New is new. This was going to change our lives. I’d be able to get a full night’s rest and have the energy to do all kinds of stupid things.
As we prepared to bid farewell to the disappointing fluff cloud in our bedroom we came to the realization it was going to live out the rest of its existence in a landfill. It was wasteful, but it also made us sad, because this mattress had become like a disappointing child. Yeah, we hated it, but we also didn’t want it to be cast away. So my wife suggested that we offer it to a neighbor, perhaps someone needed one for a kid or a spare room. My initial thought was, gross, but I called around.
Come to find out, a neighbor was dealing with the same situation, except it was much worse. Instead of a fluff cloud disappointment, they had purchased a disappointing bag of gel mattress. The kind that comes in a box and seems too good to be true...well, they are. This poor guy had been sleeping on this in-a-box-mattress so hard his box springs broke and were coming up through the gel. I helped him take our mattress and box springs to his house and we spent the night on our guest mattress. A mattress I got from my Mother which is neither soft, nor firm, but something I refer to as a crunchy trampoline.
After a horrible night’s sleep, the doorbell rand the next morning, and the delivery guys were there with our new mattress. They brought it up to our room and then came up with the box springs...except, there was only one...For the uninitiated, nearly all king mattresses use two, twin-sized box springs. Where is the other set? You only ordered one sir. The fine print was, you only get 1 free box spring, you have to buy the other. Obscenities erupted as one could imagine. It got worse when they told me they couldn’t get me another set for two weeks because of a shipment delay. Then things went to terrible when they told me I had to refuse the delivery so they could re-order my mattress set with two box springs because of some dumb bureaucratic policy they had. This meant they had to take this beautiful piece of fabric covered marble right back out of the house.
That night as I was standing in my front yard cursing the absurd corporate policies of big-box retailers and coming to terms with the fact that I had just dropped a thousand dollars to sleep on a crunchy trampoline for the next two weeks, I see my neighbor in his yard. I yell at him. “Y’all have a good night’s sleep?” He looks over at me and says, “Yeah we did...but I had to throw out your boxsprings, they were too tall for us…”
I’m not one to go ballistic, but let’s just say when that beautiful new mattress finally arrived I got both of those damn boxsprings for free, and a good night’s sleep.