The Mattress Saga

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Now this is a story all about how

My sleeping time got mixed around

And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there.

I’ll tell you how I came to sleep on a bed full of air.

Will Smith certainly does know how to have an interesting mattress story, and I think so do I.

Our story begins back in the distant annals of last month, when I received a letter from Argos informing me that my mattress has been deemed to be unsafe due to failing some fire safety regulations. I have to admit to being completely nonplussed by this state of affairs – to be honest, if there had been a fire in my room and my mattress had gone up in flames, I wouldn’t have been writing to the manufacturers complaining about the lack of fireproofing.

The letter offered some helpful advice on how to avoid any further danger, such as not smoking in bed and not surrounding yourself with lit candles before sleeping. I honestly worry that they even had to write that – when I fall asleep, I am comatose for a long period of time, and I tend to move around a bit. I also tend to be encased in lots of fabric-type stuff. Thus, I would be somewhat concerned about having open flames nearby, unless I fancied waking up on a pyre.

Still, I rang up and spoke to a very nice person from Argos who said that they would send me a replacement mattress, one that was a) more expensive and b) presumably impossible to set on fire or something like that. Their computer system was having a bit of trouble so I was told I’d receive a call the following day to arrange collection of the old mattress and delivery of the new one.

And so cometh the next day, cometh the telephone call. (I feel strange mixing Olde English and modern technology – has anybody connecteth to thine Internet recently?) I’d had a look at a couple of dates in the next week or so that I could do, maybe looking at something in very early February as a worst case scenario.

The best date they could offer me was Saturday 8 March.

This was somewhat of a surprise, but I figured that it was a Saturday, so that would probably be fine, and I agreed, hung up, went back to my desk, and immediately remembered that it was my friend’s stag do on that day. Literally the only Saturday I wasn’t going to be home. That was somewhat unfortunate.

So I called them back to rearrange the delivery. I gave them my order number, told them that the date didn’t work for me and could I reschedule it? Oddly enough the range of dates they had was completely different, and there was a slot free for today (22 February). I was pleasantly surprised and a bit confused that it hadn’t been available twenty minutes earlier, but I agreed and everything was rejigged.

The conversation itself was a bit painful because for some reason I could hear my voice over the phone from the other end, with a delay of about a second. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to hold a conversation when everything you’re saying is played back to you with a slight delay, but it is astonishingly hard to form even basic sentences. So I may not have been at my most coherent and was quite keen to end the conversation without asking too many questions. This, as we will shortly discover, might have been a mistake.

I was assured that I would get an email confirming all of this. Which I didn’t (and later discovered that they actually can’t do, so I don’t know what the guy I was talking to was hoping would happen. Maybe a Nigerian prince might happen upon my order number in the process of informing me of the increasing number of very rich relatives who live in Africa and died without a will. Astonishing.)

Which brings me to today.

Around lunchtime the door rang. Well, the person at the door rang, if the door itself rang that would be an incredibly inconvenient experience. I came down and there were two gentlemen saying that they were there to collect the mattress. I asked if they were planning to deliver anything, and they said no. They weren’t wearing any uniforms or anything and I did wonder whether they were just out for a free mattress. However, it seemed unlikely that they would ring random doors on the off-chance that the residents were expecting to get rid of a mattress – and to be honest, if they had, then giving them one that you wouldn’t be allowed to light candles around would probably be due penance for their sins. So I passed the mattress on to them, and they said to ring up if I didn’t get a delivery.

I waited a couple of hours until another delivery I was expecting arrived, and then I decided to ring Argos again, at which point the tale derailed slightly.

You see, when I rang up to get my new mattress, they ended up creating a new order for it without telling me they were doing this, or informing me of the new order number. The original order number that I had for the first mattress I had bought referred only to the return of the first mattress; thus, when I rang up to rearrange the delivery of the new mattress, from the order number I gave them they took it to mean I wanted to reschedule the collection of the mattress, but not the delivery of the new one. Hence today’s mix-up.

I was told that the people who had collected my mattress were out of the area now and wouldn’t be able to return it (evidently they were well on their way to Spain cackling maniacally at the mattress they’d stolen, before disappearing into an explosion because one of them had been smoking) and so I would have to rearrange delivery.

After some haggling we agreed on a new date in a few days’ time for the new mattress to come, and they offered to get me a free airbed to tide me through until then. On the one hand this was quite a nice gesture from them; on the other hand without it I would have been sleeping on the floor for the next four days or so. They offered to deliver it to my local Argos store, which they deduced would be Didcot.

Now, Didcot is about an hour and a half away from where I live at the moment. It is, however, the closest store to my home address where my parents live. At this point I felt a little bit like some cats were having a small barbecue outside, because I was smelling a rat.

A little bit of further enquiry revealed that, although the collection of my mattress was arranged to be at the house where the mattress was at and had been delivered to (a sensible set-up, I thought), the new mattress was scheduled to be delivered to my home address an hour away. I have no idea how they even got hold of that address, since for the previous order everything had gone to Kenilworth where I live at the moment. The only place I can think of that the address would have appeared would have been the address for the cardholder, but somehow they managed to extrapolate from that that I want my new mattress delivered there instead.

So I managed to get that cleared up, which meant we had to rechoose delivery dates; this ended up with a week Wednesday being the next available free slot.

In the meantime, they called my nearest Argos store, in Leamington Spa, to set up the order for my air bed. In the meantime I Googled directions to the store, and worked out how to get there, before my Spidey senses started tingling and I thought it was worth confirming the postcode of the store.

It turns out that there are two Argos’s in Leamington Spa. And the one I’d found on the Internet was not the one that my air bed was going to. That could have been extremely awkward.

So, ending the call I drove into Leamington to collect my air bed. I managed to find the store without too much difficulty. When I got there and gave them my order number, they tried to charge me for it, and understandably looked a bit bemused when I told them that I was getting it for free. I didn’t blame them for doubting me, I wouldn’t have believed me. Fortunately, the person who had taken the call must have been around there and she was able to verify that it was something I was getting for free, and wished me the best in getting everything sorted out.

I brought the airbed back, and after a couple of false starts in inflating it (it has an inbuilt pump at one end, and, as I discovered after about ten minutes of pumping and confusion, a hole at the other end) it is ready to go. Distinctly uncomfortable, but it’s free so I can’t really complain.

So I now have 11 days to enjoy the pleasure of an inflatable mattress, which is much smaller than my bedframe and thus makes the slats rattle if I try and sleep on it. I have friends coming over next weekend and we’ll probably be in the bizarre situation where all three of us will be trying to sleep on the floor in my bedroom.

Oh, and I went on the Argos website just now to check that everything was OK, and the delivery address for the mattress is still set to go to the wrong address.

I don’t really get angry at stuff, so I’m finding the situation more amusing than anything. But I do suspect that over the next 11 days (potentially more if the mattress still gets delivered to the wrong place) I will grow to have a passionate dislike of airbeds. And a very strong desire to keep hold of the next mattress I get. And probably a desire to not use Argos to deliver things in future.