Mattresses, Unbeknownst To Many, Are A Lot Like Cars. Every Year New Ones Roll Out, They’re Always

Mattresses, unbeknownst to many, are a lot like cars. Every year new ones roll out, they’re always tweaking and innovating and you’ll never find the same one you loved decades ago when buying a new one.

Where I sold mattresses had a three month return or exchange program for this reason. New beds take a while to break in, and they’re a big expense. Your body is used to the old one. So we made sure people were loving it. If a bed got returned we’d take it back, sanitize and clean it, then sell it again on clearance.

To sell these we always had to disclose what clearance meant to customers, and they had to sign that they knew what they were getting. (FYI, not every company is as… forthright about the used bed situation)

In clearance we had beds that were floor models, we had returns, and more rarely we had old models whose line had been discontinued. These clearance beds were always final sale, so a bed could only be sold twice.

Now, the manager at the store I was working at had realized a vital fact. Clearance beds in the warehouse didn’t sell, especially old models that salespeople weren’t familiar with. And even more especially in odd sizes, like twin extra longs. So he set up a split king on the showroom floor to exhibit clearance beds, pulling all those forgotten twin extra longs out onto the showroom.

Almost all of these were brand new discontinued models. Beds I’d never learned in training were exhumed to be displayed. The manufacturers had moved on to new lines and they’d been left behind. Why would he take such in interest in selling old stock, you might wonder? Because we made double commission on the sales margin of clearance beds, and if we’d had a bed long enough they dropped the cost in the system so it was a fucking cash cow to sell these. Even with huge discounts the commissions were wonderful so it was a win win.

When I got started I was jazzed about this program, I was so on board to sell weird old brand new beds and make a ton of money. I had a wonderful older couple come in, looking for a split king adjustable set. This was a white whale sale.

The current clearance models on the floor were a latex mattress that was brand new despite being of an age to start first grade, and a tempurpedic floor model. The couple laid down and it was like magic. They each loved the bed they’d laid down on. They wanted to buy the whole shebang.

I. Was. Thrilled. I told them about the clearance program and what that meant, and they weren’t bothered in the least. I wrote up the sale then dashed into the back, fizzing with excitement to tell my manager what I’d done.

“You sold the death bed?!” He asked in delight.

I pulled up short, my smile freezing in place. “What…?”

“Didn’t you check the notes?”

I hesitated for a long beat then slowly shook my head. You see, dear reader, all beds had a personal history. Every clearance bed had logs written up by the person who took the return, as well as warehouse crew after sanitizing. It helped us know what to expect when selling them. “Wasn’t it just a floor model? You said it was a floor model…”

He slowly shook his head. I checked the notes.

It turned out, it had been sold as a floor model. The first time. But the company had made an exception and taken it back as a return two months later. Why? Because it’s owner had passed away.

I stared at the computer in horror and my manager shrugged. “They signed the clearance form. Technically it was a floor model.”

“We know for a fact that a man died in that bed!”

“What they don’t know can’t haunt them,” he said philosophically.

The man came back a week later for more sheets, utterly delighted to tell me how well they were sleeping. I clamped my teeth down around the secret of the deathbed, choosing to let them love their new bed without the stigma. Only one person would be haunted by that deathbed, and it was me.

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

HA I just got a super positive rejection! I’ll put it under the cut (because it might get long), but this is genuinely helpful writing advice

Keep reading

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

Time For Some Extremely Important Reading Homework, North Americans

Some of these books you may have already read. A refresher never hurts, though, if you have the time.

It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis. Historical Fiction, 1930s USA.

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak. Historical Fiction, Nazi Germany.

Parable of the Sower - Octavia E Butler. Dystopian speculative fiction.

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury. Dystopian sci-fi.

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood. Dystopian fiction.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - Timothy Snyder. Non-fiction.

Leave further suggestions in the comments! What else should I/we read?

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

Bones isn’t xenophobic toward Vulcans, he just roasts Spock, specifically, for being Vulcan the same way my siblings roast me for being gay. They’re both in on the joke, and if Spock asked Bones to stop, he would. Instead, this sassy motherfucker insults humanity as a whole and Bones’s abilities as a doctor in retaliation.

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

It’s uncanny how similar Trump is acting like Hitler. People are now doing the Nazi salute. They’re drawing the symbol. The KKK was seen in Kentucky asking people to join them. ICE has been ripping families apart. Companies have pulled back Diversity Initiatives. We’re no longer part of WHO and there won’t be any communication from the CDC at least until February 1st. We’re being censored and the news can’t be trusted. Thousands of Americans didn’t know there were protests against Trump yesterday outside the U.S. Quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne Frank have been compared to what’s going on right now.

According to The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Studies and Prevention the U.S. has officially been given a red flag alert for Genocide.

I’m exhausted but I will never stop being angry.

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

thinking about how the world would be better if more people understood the differences between 'the author failed to tell the story they wanted to tell' and 'the author told the story they wanted to tell, but they told it badly' and 'the author told the story they wanted to, and they told it well, but it wasn't the story I wanted to read'

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ealdwineoldfriend

3 months ago

Anyway if you see this you have to reblog and tag with a delight from ur day -- even the littlest thing counts

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first thing this morning my cat crawled into my arms to be cuddled very nice thing to wake up to he's like a little hot water bottle but soft and purring

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

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ealdwineoldfriend

5 months ago

Recommendations for media about translation, interpreting, and foreign languages

Movies and TV

Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020) The Interpreter (2005) The Last Stage (1948)

Books

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri The Interpreter by Suki Kim Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok Translation Nation by Héctor Tobar Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip Translation State by Ann Leckie

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ref

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ealdwineoldfriend

3 months ago

Tags

cats my son kevin beasties

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

yup, it's all a joke to me...

among the most enduring lessons i have ever received in screenwriting stands this one from glenn gordon caron…

(glenn created and ran the wildly successful, long-running “medium” - on which i worked for two seasons as co-executive producer - as well as one or two other things that have… you know… shaped the very face of popular culture as we know it)

…a legendarily tough grader who likes to do his master-level work without a lot of noisy fuss and bluster (and probably dislikes being singled out for public praise like this) glenn would set the table for every one of our story pitches to him with a single, and deceptively simple, request:

“tell it to me like it’s a joke.”

now, “medium” was several things - among them, one of tv’s best portrayals of a messy but functional marriage, as well as a crime procedural dotted with representations of unspeakable violence, usually perpetrated by serial killers in the psychic visions of its lead character - but “barrel of laughs” is most likely not in the top ten descriptors for that series…

…so how did “tell it to me like it’s a joke” fit into the equation?

a joke - for my money - is to storytelling what haiku is to poetry: the shortest possible distillation of formal intent. a set-up, brief development, and a punch line…

…short, sweet — and, if successfully told, climaxing in an explosive, involuntary emotional response.

for a story to work in any genre, every successful element from the macro to the micro - from the sweep of the story, to the shape of individual scenes, the arcs of the characters, and the very structure of individual lines of dialogue - should be reducible to the specific outlines of a joke.

set up, development, punch line.

as you have guessed by now, the punch line doesn’t have to be funny - it can be horrific (as it often was on “medium”) or tear-inducing, or a twist that sends the story into an unexpected direction - but it is the nexus toward which the set up and development need to work in absolute concert - there’s no room for fat on a joke, only specificity of purpose.

to this day, the “tell it to me like it’s a joke” principle guides me through story and scene development like a trusty compass: if you can tell your story in the most concise way possible and still deliver your emotional punchline, then all the adornments will fall into line as needed.

“tell it to me like it’s a joke” is neither a formula nor a cure all - it’s a test: if your concept survives on the “tell it to me like it’s a joke” touchstone, then at least you know that the gross anatomy is in place… there are still a thousand ways to mess it up, to be sure, but the airframe will fly - so long as you outfit it with all the necessary equipment.

you wanna know my favorite joke?

an aimless young artist is recruited by an organization that fights monsters… while at first she dislikes her employer and considers him a stuffed shirt, she ultimately finds in him the father she never had.

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Advice

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