Go to the Mattresses

One exciting thing about living in small town, North Dakota is that it is remote. This can be good, it certainly makes for some beautiful (and long) drives to get to other places but it also means there are some inconveniences. We've found that it is difficult to get things shipped here. We first experienced this when we were still in Cleveland and trying to get our earnest money to the real estate company in order to secure the bid we placed on our house. It's a long story, but we thought the first check didn't make it at all and so we needed to send another one ASAP. I went to the Post Office to try and overnight a check to our kind and patient realtor. That's when I was informed that you cannot overnight things to Dickinson. Oh sure, you can pay the overnight fee but it will still take at least two days to get there. In the end, it took about a week to get to our realtor because even after the check arrived in North Dakota the post office was snowed in for a few days.... in mid-April.
Now that we live here, we have had several instances of delayed packages. Because of the limited retail available, we joined Amazon prime as an alternative way to get what we need. "Prime" shipping here however has turned out to be 3-4 days instead of the advertised two-day speed. It doesn't really bother us, we just have to giggle about the shipping time estimates being so far off from reality. We understand that this town is not close to any big cities so it takes time for things to make their way here, but what really baffles us is that when we track our packages they seem to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in warehouses. It's as if any package that is being sent to North Dakota has to go through a rigorous preparation program. It's like BUDS for boxes. I think in the parcel world that stands for Briefings for Unique and Dangerous Sites. I imagine that packages headed to North Dakota have to be trained to withstand the extreme temperatures, avoid bison patties, know how to react if approached by large wildlife, steer clear of oil dirks, accept the fact that they will get bleached in the direct sunlight and hold their ground in a high wind. The things we ordered probably got a big pep talk as they were being loaded into the truck. "You can do this. This is what you spent a week in the warehouse preparing for. It might be cold, it might be hot, it will be windy and you better believe the sun will be shining.... unless they are having one of those crazy electrical storms... or a tornado, but that's okay because nothing can keep a good box down. Now get in there and make us proud!"
So while anything and everything takes its time getting to us, nothing has given us more trouble than mattresses. In one instance, I ordered a mattress from walmart.com for site to store pickup. When I ordered it, the website claimed it was available for same-day pick up. (Things sell out so fast that it is sometimes safer to order it online. By the time you physically get to the store it may be gone.) The estimated pick-up time then changed to 3-5 days and finally settled on 7-10 business days. I guess that mattress did not complete its BUDS training in a timely fashion. The real saga, however, is the tale of the "cruton" (aka futon) mattress I ordered for the twins. I ordered a black, 8" futon mattress. It was supposed to arrive in two days. A week later, it still wasn't here. The tracking number showed that it had made its way to Bismarck which usually means it would be on our doorstep in a day or two. I called the post office and then fed-ex to see what the hold up was. It turns out that somehow the mattress had been separated from its shipping label so it got sent to the fed-ex depository of lost items..... in Tennessee.
I guess Tennessee is the logical place to send things that you don't know what to do with. Tennessee is, after all, the Volunteer State so I imagine that when fed-ex said, "Hey, where should we send all of these things that don't have a label?", the entire state of Tennessee jumped up and down with its hand in the air and said, "Ooh, pick me pick me! I volunteer!"
Anyway, the nice fed-ex lady with a pleasant twang in her voice had me describe what was in my missing package and then I suppose the employees just started sorting through the giant lost and found pile because they found it a few hours later and called me back. Of course, they claimed they would overnight it. Three days later it arrived. Just looking at it, I could tell it had been on some journey. The mattress was compressed into a cylinder shape and then shipped in a duffel bag which now had several large rips in it. It looked exactly like the pictures of the product had online and a new shipping label was affixed declaring that this was the very mattress I had been waiting for. I was ecstatic. I promptly pushed, pulled and dragged the very heavy thing up the stairs and into the boys' room. I was excited to watch the mattress "explode" from a 12" diameter cylinder into a full-sized futon mattress.
The first difficulty came in trying to get it out of the bag. There were so many rips that it kept getting snagged, so I ended up grabbing a pair of scissors and just cutting the rest of the bag open. Once the bag was out of the way, the mattress did indeed explode. It was a full sized mattress, but it was white, it was only 6" thick and it was decidedly not made for a futon. It had no intention of bending in the middle, thank you very much, despite my best efforts. We could get it to bend, kind of, and it would stay that way as long as people were sitting on it, but as soon as we stood up it would spring back into its natural flat shape and come flying off of the futon frame. Of course, the boys thought it was pretty awesome, but I was not pleased.
The people at Amazon were very nice when I reported the problem and promised to "overnight" us a new futon mattress. They also wanted us to put the first mattress in the duffel bag of the new one in order to ship it back to them. Despite our protestations that A. you can't overnight things to Dickinson and B. there was no way we were going to get that mattress back into a duffel bag of any size, the lady on the phone was optimistic that everything would go according to plan. There was just no convincing her that it wasn't going to work so we agreed to give it the old college try.
Needless to say, the mattress did not arrive the following day but it did come in a speedy three day time frame. The new mattress duffel bag was a behemoth, with a diameter of about 15". With Marc's help, we managed to get the thing upstairs and get the duffel bag off in one piece. For the second time, a mattress exploded into being and this time, thank goodness, it was exactly the right thing. It worked beautifully.
Now came the fun of trying to squish a fully expanded full-sized mattress into a duffelbag.  I'm sure watching Marc and me trying to roll up a mattress would have been a comic experience. We tried several times in various ways. We actually got close- I think we got it rolled down to an 18" diameter at the cost of several rug burns on our knees.
Once again, we called Amazon and reported that we now knew for sure that we could not get the mattress back in the bag. The perky optimistic people on the phones had lots of other ideas for shipping the mattress back. They all involved a lot of work for us like buying a special mattress box and driving long distances to a place that would ship something that large, assuming we could fit the mattress in our van in the first place. I guess we could always borrow a truck from.... well almost anyone. In the end, Marc convinced them that making us do a lot of work for their mistake was unacceptable. If they could send someone to pick it up, fine. That's when they told us just to keep the thing. So, the upshot is if you come to visit us you will NOT be sleeping on an air mattress because we have mattresses to spare around here. When you go to our house, you go to the mattresses.