The carny and the mattress

I’m so tired right now since we spent most of the day running around.

We had a very strange cashier at the Walmart this morning. I felt like we were on a game show. She never stopped talking and it wasn’t just to us. Some of the things she did was…

… greet us with “good morning, let’s do this!”
… count the number of items as she scanned them
… talk to the items as she bagged them (“this will go in this way, now you go in there, don’t give me a hard time”)
… spin the carousel of bags and count down as Joe grabbed each one

She was extremely energetic and would make a perfect carny, but as a cashier she just made me uneasy. Where do they find these people? Don’t get me wrong, she was really friendly, but there was definitely something off. The whole experience was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever experienced. Once we got out to the car, Joe told me he felt like yelling, “No whammies, no whammies!”

—

We’ve been talking about getting a new mattress for probably two years now and we finally did it. What a relief! We looked at Carson Pirie Scott’s home store first since we donated to their Goodwill program and got coupons in exchange, but the sales woman pissed me off. I told her I wasn’t interested in a pillow-top mattress and instead of showing me the non-pillow-tops, she instead insulted my intelligence. I don’t appreciate that shit and I also don’t buy from people like that.

We ended up getting a mattress from Back to Bed instead. And ironically, we chose a pillow-top. Once we realized from talking to their non-insulting salesman that they no longer make mattresses that you can flip (pillow-top or not), we decided we liked that kind more because it’s softer.

Guess we’ve been out of the mattress-buying loop since the one we have is seven years old. It was a good deal at the time – $400 – which was a lot when I was paying for it myself (Joe was with me when I bought it but we had just started dating). Over the past year we’ve spent a lot of time testing out mattresses and seriously, we could have hemmed and hawed forever. Who really knows how the bed is going to be until they get it home and sleep on it? So today we decided to say fuck it and just go with our gut.

I think we made the right decision. I hope we did. I guess if the pillow-top ends up sucking at least we’ll know from first-hand experience. The nice thing is the model we got is nicer than the one we saw at Carson’s and cost the same. Plus we got a free mattress protector. Instead of waiting to have it delivered, we picked it up from the warehouse right away.

I’m hoping to sleep quite well tonight.