Don’t Look Now But the Smart Bed Is Watching
They say that age is just a number. I don’t know. Just like I don’t know who the heck ‘they’ are. Let’s face it. The infamous ‘they’ we all love to quote could be nothing more than a rotating group of bored college kids who earn credits by making stuff up. It wouldn’t be the first time. Or maybe ‘they’ are they overnight janitors at the USAID headquarters.
All I know is that I have enough numbers in my life. In addition to my rapidly advancing age, I have my own phone number – which I actually remember more frequently than my wife’s. I also have my Social Security number, my house number, the pass code to get into the community clubhouse and, of course, my sleep number.
My Bed Is Smarter than Me
“A sleep number,” you ask? Yes, indeed my dear friends. My wife and I took the plunge and replaced our old bed with a smart bed. The old bed wasn’t just so old that all of the dead skin cells embedded in the mattress were eligible for retirement, it was also dumb.
Our new bed is smart. It is so smart it can tell me how long it takes to fall asleep every night – like I need more stress to boost my insomnia. My smart bed can measure by breathing; it can keep track of my heart rate; it can have stealth discussions with the refrigerator about all the unhealthy food I stuff down my gullet just minutes before bedtime.
You know what else my smart bed can do? It can insult me every morning with a sleep number, which is slightly reminiscent of the combined scores that judges with no moral compasses pass out to Olympic gymnasts and figure skaters. I’ll tell you this: I have never walked away from a night’s sleep with a gold medal. I think the Chinese sleepers are cheating.
Apparently, I Need Coaching
On the first morning after we got the new smart bed, I eagerly opened the bed’s app to check my very first sleep number. Let me just say that the bed wasn’t impressed with my efforts. The bed was supposed to improve our sleep. Yet if the first night was any indication of things to come, we would have been better off trading in the old bed for two prison cots and an extra slice of bread at dinner.
But alas, that first night was a fluke. Both my wife and I improved our sleep numbers the following night. Ditto for night three. Along the way, we discovered that we just needed a little coaching – FROM THE BED!!!
That’s right boys and girls. Our bed is so smart that it can offer us tips and tricks to sleep better. But that’s not all. It can encourage us to get regular exercise and pay attention to our diets. It can coach us on reducing stress. It’s so amazing that I expect to wake up one morning to a reminder to rotate my tires.
The best part is that the bed is so positive and encouraging, unlike the GPS app on my phone. That thing talks to me like I’m a three-year-old who thinks he knows where he’s going but has a tendency to get lost just trying to find the bathroom.
Now It’s a Game
We are now about four months into the whole smart bed thing. Guess what? Sleep has become a game. My wife and I compare sleep numbers every morning – just to see who is superior at nocturnal bliss. She wins most nights.
As for me, I miss the good old days when a bed knew its place. It was a time when a man could slip under the sheets and sleep comfortably in the knowledge that no human or electronic gadget was eavesdropping in the darkness.
Those days are gone. I guess my only recourse is to surrender. Or maybe I could just insist that my sleep number is just a number. After all, it works for my age.
