The Big Sleep
No sane person would take a red-eye flight but it was January and I was headed to Minnesota. I planned to board the plane at LAX around midnight, catch a bit of sleep during the 4-hour flight and show up at the client, Select Comfort, before 8:00 a.m. their time. Granted it was a brutal way to travel but it eliminated at least a half day being exposed to Minnesota weather.
I looked for ways to cut short any trip to the twin cites since my first visit five years earlier when the client was an iron ore mine near Duluth on the shores of Lake Superior. It was mid-April and the day I arrived was the first time in over 100 consecutive days that the temperature in Duluth would reach above freezing. I pulled into the company parking lot after driving three hours due north from Minneapolis, got out of the rental car and was immediately bitten on the neck by the first mosquito of the season. A year in Minnesota consists of an 8-month winter, worse than that of Alaska, followed by 4 months of insect infestations interrupted only by an unbearably humid 2-week summer. The trip to Duluth was the only time I ever worked for a mining company and the scale of the operation bordered on science fiction. The mine was a deep open hole gouged out of the earth and larger than all of Orange County. The size of the equipment was in keeping with the size of the mosquitoes.
On this trip via the red-eye, I was headed to Plymouth, a suburb less than a 15-minute drive from the airport. My client was the Select Comfort Corporation which was in their third year of manufacturing beds that are now, some 20 years later, advertised as "sleep number" beds. They were still a small company at that point with their complete organization in a single cramped building. I was given a tour of the facility and observed how the beds were designed, built and tested. There were also salespeople at the site and a showroom where various styles of beds were on display for walk-in customers. At some point during the day there was a break in my interview schedule and I strolled over to the showroom to see what it was like to lie down on the finished product, thus completing an inescapably linked chain of events. My aversion to Minnesota's climate had led me to take the red-eye. The red-eye prevented me from getting a decent night's sleep. Being deprived of sleep led me to fall soundly asleep on the showroom bed within a few seconds. Falling asleep so quickly, something that I can never do normally, led me to buy the bed.
To top it all off, I had fallen asleep while lying on my back. The only way I have ever been able to sleep is on my side. I have never understood how anyone can sleep on their back or stomach and am of the opinion it requires an unenlightened soul to do so.
Sleeping on one's side is not without challenges. First of all, a proper pillow is critical to prevent one's ear from becoming a 3,000 watt amplifier of one's own heartbeat. Then, if you align your body's full length congruently as I do, the bone-on-bone contact at the knees must be relieved by inserting between them a second pillow or a scrunched portion of blanket. Added to this, since I have a situation with my lower back, is a critical need for a rock-hard mattress. Consequently, lying on my side results in the smallest possible surface supporting the weight of my body. This greatly increases the pounds per square inch as happens with stiletto heels. This maximum downward pressure on an ultra-hard mattress produces a condition, not unlike rigor mortis, that causes one to wake every 45 minutes and switch sides to avoid permanent paralysis. Switching to the opposite side is not as simple as it sounds as one must take the time to carefully readdress the ear and knee issues.
To complicate things a wee bit more, I cannot tolerate having my feet covered by a blanket that is tucked under the mattress at the foot of the bed. The uncovered feet became a necessity when I married. My wife insisted that she could only sleep with all windows shut, whereas up to that time I had always slept with an open window. I offered as a compromise to have the window shut but the blanket must not be tucked in, at least not on my side of the bed, so my feet could be exposed.
When you take all of the above into consideration you hopefully can appreciate to some degree how significant it was for me to simply lie down on my back and immediately go to sleep on the showroom bed. Unless they spring a leak, the beds and mattresses made by Select Comfort are intended to last indefinitely as you are essentially supported by a rectangular bag of air. I certainly have no regrets as, in the years since purchasing the bed, my back has never been better.
Recently, my wife announced that she was interested in an adjustable bed which led to yet another situation requiring compromise. I was unwilling to trust my back to a different mattress but thankfully discovered, by way of the internet, that Select Comfort offered an adjustable frame onto which we could mount our current mattress. To determine firsthand what was meant by the term "adjustable", we went to Pasadena to one of Select Comfort's 477 locations. Between my lower back concerns and my wife's penchant for space-age accessories, the combined cost of the original bed and the new frame exceeded what I paid for any of my first three automobiles.
During the initial two weeks with the new adjustable frame, my wife spent her first 45 minutes after coming to bed each night pushing the envelope. The frame featured four different vibrating massage programs activated by a wireless remote with a glow-in-the-dark LCD dashboard independently controlling both the head and foot of the bed which you could "electronically adjust to your every whim." Frequently these whimsical sessions wouldn't begin until after I had gone to sleep. Over these two weeks I developed at least a partial insight as to what it must be like for those held at Guantanamo.
Each night when the interminable series of adjustments accompanied by the groaning of the electric motor finally came to rest, the north-to-south surface of the mattress resembled the seven hills of Rome. My head was up, my butt down, knees up and feet down. Much to my horror, at the conclusion of my wife's experimentation phase, this landscape turned out to be her go-to configuration. I soon realized that it was physically impossible for the body of a human being to recline on its side on a Z-shaped north-to-south axis.
Fortunately, over time I have developed a way to adapt topographically. The solution is somewhat difficult to describe. Simply put, it involves utilizing ridges and valleys that run east-to-west in addition to north-to-south, in which to nestle one's bodily parts such as neck, torso, limbs, etc. The one remaining situation I have yet to resolve is the jarring affect of awakening each morning to find myself in the shape of a swastika.