Linkology: The Best of the Internet for 11/4/11
Today’s post is about mattresses, because they’re the only product that has ruined my brain.
When I buy things, I research the everloving juice out of them. I compile so much data on pending purchases that Google sends me a bill for smoking their servers. After any given product I buy, I am capable of sitting down with friends and explaining my empirical criteria for making my decision. People often walk away or tell me to shut up. Things are thrown at times.
This all changed when I had to buy a new mattress. My old one was nearing ten years of age and was firm enough to find a home in any given European torture museum. I was waking up with a zillion pressure points every day, and I couldn’t fill up my morning coffee carafe without shaking like I was being tasered. Something had to change.
Off to Google I went. Google had all the answers. And if Google didn’t, then surely scores of faceless strangers waxing poetic about mattresses on forums or Yelp or wherever would. There was a mattress out there, one that was BEST, and I would certainly find it. DO NOT DOUBT ME.
After two months of looking, a search history that made me look like a crazy cat person with a sleeping fetish, and a half-dozen showroom visits later, I was vexed. Truly flummoxed for the first time in my life on a product purchase.
Because there is no one perfect mattress. It’s entirely subjective. Which, it should be noted, is not fair, because if I can’t rely on the opinions of random strangers on the Internet to help me hone my decision, then how in the world was I supposed to buy the best?
WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO, JUDGE FOR MYSELF? Using only intuition? My own reaction and evaluation?
Apparently, yes. And let me tell you, I now understand why retailers offer insane return policies on mattresses. Because by the sound of things, at least half of the population return the things after 30 days. Buying a new mattress isn’t a ‘thing’ you do, it’s a journey.
The memory foam ones smell like offgassing uranium and are made out of synthetic petroleum-based foam, the exact components of which I could not determine but am certain would make an elbow grow from my forehead. The latex ones feel funky and have insane rebound, so I felt like I was lying on the floor of a bounce house. The traditional pillow-topped inner spring varieties seem silly to me, because being unflippable, they would develop body indentations in mere months and set out afterward to ruin my back once and for all.
I nearly gave up. You can review ANY mattress on the planet and find people whining about SOMETHING. The smell, the chemical makeup, how hot it sleeps, the comfort in cold rooms, how it handles motion transfer. I came very close to putting a spreadsheet together for all this but somehow kept a frail grasp on my sanity and just gave up.
Gave up?
Yes, gave up.
I told Google to bugger off, I swore off ePinions, and I vowed to never again consult Sleep Like The Dead. I was going all Zen about this, I was going gut-feel. Malcom Gladwell would be proud. I was gonna thinslice this bad boy.
So, months after I began my search, I walked into a nearby store and picked out one that felt best. I didn’t whip out my iPhone, I didn’t look for rankings. I really didn’t care. I found one that felt good to me and bought it.
You’re saying, So what? You’re not getting what I’m laying down here. But that’s the point: I am weird, and you are (probably) not. You walk into a mattress store, buy one, then go to the movies. I spend 90 days doing a multivariate comparative analysis, logging HOURS on dusty websites, listening to the opinions of 20-something bloggers who are more interested in what’s on Spotify than the mattress they’re reviewing. Only after I exhaust myself do I fall back on what you use the moment you decide to buy a mattress.
So there’s the story of how mattresses broke my brain. Or at the very least broke it more than it already was.
Here are some links to get your mind off that phenomenal story:
Here’s some pretty clever graffiti.
Twitter Stories: a site dedicated to how we use Twitter. Pretty fascinating and definitely not the social media wonk stuff you normally see.
Go to Google right now and search ‘do a barrel roll’. Trust me. Just do it. You’re welcome.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
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More links:
MIPRO Consulting main website.
