Mattress Saga

When I moved into my new apartment, I knew there were two things that I wanted to order online: a mattress and a desk chair. Other furniture would come from a variety of sources, but I wanted to use two-day shipping from Amazon to get a mattress and a desk chair as soon as possible so that I could be comfortable while sitting down and lying down.

At first, things were looking good; I placed my order and followed tracking information online as the mattress and chair traveled from an Amazon facility to my door. On the day the packages were to be delivered, however, I came home to see an empty front porch.

Life is full of difficult questions, and I suppose we will never know the answers to some of them. What happened to those packages that day is one of those mysteries. Data entry error? Possibly. Theft? Perhaps. I waited the 36 hours recommended by Amazon when packages are marked as delivered but are missing, then contacted customer service. Fortunately, I was offered a refund for the chair and a replacement for the mattress (why the different products got different responses is another of life's mysteries). And thus began my mattress's second odyssey.

Package tracking began again at distribution, but for an unknown reason, USPS did not bring the mattress on the expected day. Next thing I knew, the package's information was updated to become UPS and it was revealed that the mattress had spent the weekend in Texas and had only just begun its voyage east. At this point, I would normally have contacted customer service, not because of my natural inclinations, but because this first time that two-day shipping had let me down meant that I needed to sleep on the floor for a week longer than I had hoped to. However, since the mattress I was being sent was a readily-offered replacement, I decided not to push my luck.

I arrived home today to see a battered package on my doorstep. I cannot tell the adventures this package has been through, but the mattress it contained was fresh and new, and I look forward to sleeping on it tonight. It is by this series of events, then, that the first item with which I hoped to furnish my apartment arrived last. I'm sure there's a moral in there somewhere.