Just Right

OK, so I was just teaching an English class, and to fill some spare time at the end of the lesson, I told the students a small story from my life. I had known that the story was amusing, but the students thought it was exceptionally funny. I'm going to reproduce this story below.

A tiny bit of backstory before we get started: the tale is about my experience buying a mattress. That’s about all you have to know. Oh, also, I’m going to write the story in a manner similar to how I related it orally, just for fun. Enjoy.

Oh, man, do I have a funny story for you when it comes to buying a mattress. OK, so a few weeks ago I bought a new mattress. I had really liked this one particular mattress in the store, but when the thing arrived at my house, I was unhappy with it because it was too hard. When I called the store to ask if I could return it, they said no. When I asked them why the mattress I had tried at the store was soft and the one I had in front of me was so hard, they said, "Well, the mattress in the store has been lain on thousands of times." Great, I thought, just great! I was really upset. My girlfriend, however, said that I should not worry. She said once the mattress was broken in, everything would be fine.

A few weeks, later the mattress was still totally hard. But things weren't all lost because my girlfriend, who lives with me, still had her own mattress, from her old apartment. But that particular mattress had been too soft. What were we going to do? We did some thinking and came up with an idea: What would happen if one lay a soft mattress on top of a hard one? And would you know, the answers is this: You get the perfect mattress! Yup, the mattress on which we now sleep -- it's actually two mattresses -- isn’t too hard or too soft. It's just right.

How great is that? Oh, oh, also, this story has a funny coda. After this was all said and done -- it was probably about two weeks later -- my girlfriend and I went back to her hometown for a weekend. When we were there, we stayed at her mom’s house and slept in her childhood bed, like you do. And this bed, wow, let me tell you, it was a stone. It was the hardest bed I had ever slept in. When the weekend was over, I asked my girlfriend what was up with that bed. She then said to me, "Oh, it's always been like that. I've had it for 15 years."

I couldn’t believe it. "15 years!” I said, “and it’s always been like that!” I was flabbergasted. “OK, so then what made you think that the mattress that I had bought was going to get any softer?” And at that,  she just smiled. She smiled because she had been gotten. She had no answer.