Gratitude Monday: I'll sleep on it

It’s a small thing today that I’m grateful for. Well, small and not-small. A bed. I’m grateful that, after nearly six months of make-do, I’ve got a real mattress and box spring to sleep on.

My previous set was way past its use-by date; I bought it around 1990, but I just never seemed to have the disposable income that would allow for replacing it. So it was always easier to not do anything about it than to go mattress shopping.

When I knew I was relocating across the country, I decided that ditching the set would be a forcing function, so that I could begin my new chapter on the East Coast with new sleeping arrangements.

(Getting it taken away turned out to be a Whole Thing, involving a company that promised way more than it delivered, causing me several new layers of stress on what’s already one of the life-shorteners. Maybe I’ll write about it at some point. Maybe not. But if you’re in the Bay Area, avoid an outfit calling itself Remoov.)

Once here, I mean, once in my new year-lease flat, it took me a while to summon up the energy and slime-repellant to go looking for mattresses. I don’t know why or how the sleep infrastructure industry turned into such a snake pit, but it rivals used cars and most medical procedures in terms of strategic avoidance of transparency and tactical bait-and-switch techniques.

So I went with Saatva, a direct-to-consumer online-only manufacturer. They weren’t nearly as transparent as they’d have you believe (they bury the fact that they charge $99 for delivery and set-up), and their response to me expressing my misgivings was to have some bolshie woman call to assure me that if I didn’t like their operating model I could take a hike. Which is certainly an interesting approach to customer satisfaction, particularly for something that costs more that five times what my first car did.

By that time, as I’d already told her, I was too tired to start the process over.

But my mattress did arrive (through some no-name delivery service) and it is such a luxury to be sleeping on a mattress, on a box spring, on a frame. I still have to deal with getting a headboard, but for the nonce, I’m just grateful to have my very own bed again. It’s a small thing, but huge for me.