Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Mattress Pad - Part Deux

FAIL! That stupid mattress pad!! No sooner did I open the box than this lovely little notification flew out:

Being an actual lawyer, I read the official court notice inserted by Sunbeam. Apparently, Plaintiffs Bobby Fay Grammer and Sheryl Larey ( it looks like they may both be from the great state of Arkansas) filed a class action suit against Sunbeam alleging wrongdoing. Something about the safety of the electrical coils and the electromagnetic field configuration. My first reaction: How clever of Sunbeam to use the actual names of the Plaintiffs  - I mean really? Bobby Fay? How could you take him/her seriously? And YOU try saying Sheryl Larey 10 times fast. It's difficult. 

Anyway, I read the entire notice and then had to determine if this particular mattress pad was part of the settlement. So, I got out the user manual. At first I was ticked off because it was written in Spanish... then I turned it upside down and realized my error. For the life of me I couldn't tell which model I had bought. Eventually, I figured out that it wasn't one of the fatal covers. But, there was a lot of other information that gave me pause,  including a particularly scary FAQ section:
Q: I have heard that some heated products have EMFs. What is this?
A:  EMF stands for Electomagnetic Field. Blahblahblah. EMFs have not been proven to be harmful. In any event, Sunbeam has reduced the strength of EMFS in its mattress pads to very low levels. 
!
IN ANY EVENT? Is that really how you want to start that next sentence?  And what the heck are very low levels? Who decides these levels and how can I trust them? Did I just purchase a nuclear bomb for my bed.

The other distressing thing was that I had three comments on Facebook about my mattress pad purchase. My friend, Karl, said that lying all night against electrical force fields ( he called them force fields which is even scarier) will screw with your brain and your heart. Now, granted Karl is a hairdresser, but he COULD have been a doctor if he had applied to medical school and done the work. The second comment was from my uncle Tom, who IS a doctor and he thought the gift wasn't romantic enough.  The third was from my daughter who figured out that the credit I had used at Amazon.com to help pay for the mattress pad was actually HERS. Ooops. I didn't get these messages until this morning, however. So, they didn't influence my decision to ... PUT THE DAMN THING ON THE BED ANYWAY.  I had to see if the thing was going to glow.  

I turned on Bill's side of the bed and crawled into mine. I moved my leg over to his side and could feel the warmth. No green glow -  just warmth.  By the time he got into bed his side was nice and toasty.

And do you know what he did? He shimmied over to my side and laid his cold body up against mine, anyway.

Maybe it wasn't about the temperature after all.

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