I hated my old mattress.
When I moved into my room, I inherited the used furniture within and had no means to improve my lot - there's no furniture warehouse down the street. While lucky to have a personal room, I had a difficult time getting to sleep at night and never slept well on the limp mattress, springs from the box spring below digging into me through it.
My friend Eli eventually offered me a foam ("egg crate") mat, and that improved the situation slightly, though the foam would inevitably bunch up into hard ridges, and was just as uncomfortable as the problem it was solving.
I would get out of bed at least once during the night, remove the fitted sheet, and flatten the foam, refit the sheet, and crawl back under my blanket. Like I said: I hated my old mattress.
Today, I'm standing outside our hooch having a meeting with Izzy (who lives in the other half of the building). It's drizzling, but we're not minding it. Lacking an office, we have many meetings like this, one of us standing in the other's doorway, or both of us outside.
As we're chatting, two marines turn a corner and walk toward the dumpster near my room. They're each carrying a mattress and one them quips "I'll give you a good deal on this mattress!"
I notice immediately that it is more solid than the one I've been sleeping on, and ask him if he's really going to throw it out. As if in answer, his buddy deposits the other one in the trash, and I quickly say "I'll take it!".
I figure if it's not better than the one I have, I can always throw it out later. But I don't need to.
I sleep that night at a higher altitude, with the new mattress on top of my old one. It's a good set-up, except that the new mattress is slightly larger than the old, and so during the night it slowly made an escape toward the floor and I felt as if I was falling the entire night, which of course I was.
The next night I remove the old mattress from the equation, folding it in two (not a good sign that I could fold the mattress) and putting it in the corner in case I still need it. After another night, I toss it in the dumpster.
My new mattress has had a successful test run. It is probably the second worst mattress I've ever owned, but it replaced the worst, and I'm grateful for the improved conditions.
God bless the United States Marine Corps.
