Sidebar: Expensive State of Mind

Here's a little story that I thought might entertain you whilst also giving you an idea of the kind of hole that long term stress creates in one's mind.

For the last year or so I have been suffering from early morning back pain. I tend to sleep on my tummy or rotated mostly toward my front and for a while I have been waking up in the morning with pain on my lower back. I've tried various things to sort this out but eventually I came to the conclusion that it must be related to our bed. Specifically I found that I was sleeping better in India than at home and I found the beds in Indian hotels more comfortable than my own bed.

In principle our bed is not that old, 7 years. It's also a very good quality boxspring and really should be expected to last ten years, at least according to what we had been told. Nor do we have such an exciting life that we would expect to wear a bed out in 70% of its lifespan, if you follow my meaning. So I/we were slow to conclude that the problem was our bed and even slower to decide to do something about it. But after months of battling leukemia I was starting to feel pretty tired and in need of a better night's sleep. So I pressed Marion into agreeing to buy a new bed in the weeks before Kay was admitted for her BMT. My thinking was that if we ordered it before the BMT it would be delivered around the time that we came out of hospital, just in time for me/us to reap the benefits of a new, comfortable bed in terms of quality of sleep. It would also provide us with a little bit of welcome retail therapy, however superficial that sounds.

But the weeks running up to admission were anything but easy and we had little time to shop for a bed. On a Saturday, a week before admission, we ran round a couple of shops to identify the kind of bed that we had in mind. Age brings different requirements for a new bed. These days the kind of entertainment that a new bed would have to support would most likely involve sitting in a semi-reclined position, either with a book or a remote control or occasionally a laptop or iPad. So we decide we were in the market for a fairly upmarket bed with reclining features. But that was pretty much all we got done on the first day. It always takes Marion & I ages to negotiate with each other the kind of thing we want, never mind negotiating with a shop.

Still, after that first day we had a fair idea what we wanted but had not settled on a particular product. As the weekend before Kay's admission approached I tabled the subject of completing the hunt. Marion was absolutely against so doing. She said that we/she had enough to do and that she couldn't spare any more time. I pointed out that it would then be months before we continued with the subject and that I was the one suffering from the current situation. In the end a compromise was reached and we decided to go back to one shop, the Auping Plaza in Eindhoven, where we had had good service, to see if we could make a final choice within a maximum of two hours, since that's all the time that we felt could be spared.

We had measured up our current bed the previous weekend and so we headed off, figures in our heads. When we got to the shop it was pretty busy so we had plently of time to look around. The previous weekend we had only looked in the half of the shop that displayed the kind of beds that we had in mind. But while we were waiting we wandered into the other half of the shop where the more stylistic Auping products are displayed. Fairly quickly we came across a bed that we both liked but that was somewhat different from what we had in mind. It was also somewhat more expensive than we had in mind. But frankly, it is so rare for Marion & I to naturally agree on anything that paying the premium for this immediate compromise seemed like a pretty damned good investment to me.

Once we had the attention of a sales person we fairly quickly evaluated alternatives, wrote them off and chose for the premium product. These beds are made to order, including mattress and material, etc, so there is a longer delivery time, some 8 to 10 weeks. We did our usual tag team negotiation thing and got a decent percentage off the list price plus one or two other bits and pieces. We gave the measurements for the bed 2 x 210 x 80cm. Deal done, we returned home to prepare for the BMT admission.

Because of my recent sleep problems I have been counting down the weeks until delivery. Marion phoned the Auping Plaza last week and heard that the bed would be delivered on Thursday this week, ie yesterday. On Tuesday she was preparing to move out our old bed and happened to check its measurements: 2 x 210 x 90... Oooops! We had ordered the new bed to be 2 x 10cm narrower than our old bed. Ahhh, disaster. Marion quickly called up the Auping Plaza, but a deal is a deal.

So our super new ultimate, but 20cm narrower, bed was delivered yesterday. It's much, much higher off the floor than our old bed and much, much narrower. Last night I felt the need for safety rails on it since I reckon that it's easy to fall out of the damned thing and it's a long way to the floor.

So how did this expensive disaster come about? Frankly, I think that it's my fault. I measured the old bed before the first shopping trip and I think that the total width of 180cm got scrambled in my head into 2 x 80cm. I'm sure that I recollect that during the first shopping trip Marion corrected me. But during the second trip, because we were both so distracted with other things, the incorrect information ended up on the order form. When we got home I even checked the measurements of our old bed but didn't cross check them with the order. I simply confirmed what I thought that we'd ordered. What should have been a rare moment of uncompromised indulgence and marital harmony has been compromised by a stupid mistake.

I guess that we'll get used to the need to sleep more accurately but the days of sharing the bed with one of the kids have passed - I don't fancy risking the almost certain fall. Unless of course anyone is looking for a good deal on a very slightly used Auping bed?