My Air Mattress Repair Job
Mood:  d'oh
Topic: One Ramblin' Ranter!
It seems today I find myself in an interesting situation that leaves me bed less. Some of you may know that I sleep on an air mattress. I have no good reason to do so other then the fact that real beds are expensive and at the moment I am not sharing my bed with anyone. The air mattresses work out pretty well for me. I do not spend an inordinate amount of time in my bedroom except to sleep or to get dressed. The air mattress is comfortable enough to let me fall asleep relatively quickly and it works real well for one person, especially one poor and cheap person. The problem is that they are made out of vinyl and filled with air which is neither durable nor solid. The first air mattress I had actually lasted about 9 months before getting a slow leak and it lasted another month before the slow leak sped up to less than a night to leak all of the air. That mattress cost 50 dollars, which is considerably more then I wanted to spend for the second mattress. The second mattress was from a reputable company and about 15 dollars cheaper and it did not last much longer then 2 months. The one I have currently been sleeping on was 20 dollars and it also lasted a little over 2 months. It died last night and I mean from not even a noticeable leak to flat as a pancake. Three hours after I went to bed I woke up feeling the hard ground beneath me. It was late and I did not feel like investigating so I just moved my sleep spot from the airless mattress to the La-Z-Boy donated by grandpa. The chair is almost as old as me but it is still pretty comfortable and I have napped on it several times. It actually worked out pretty well last night.
Today I was busy enough to forget about my mattress problem, which resulted in a bit of a shock when I went in to go to sleep. I decided to set the chair up for sleep and deal with the problem tomorrow when I could decided if I could afford another one or not. As luck would have it sleep was extremely evasive. I decided to watch some TV to calm myself down because that works, right? TV in my house means DVR so I selected a show from my list of recorded features and it happened to be Mythbusters. Some of you may remember that I lauded this show as one of my favorites in a previous entry on April 2nd. I watched as they strapped Buster the crash test dummy into an airplane fuselage and dropped it from 20,000 feet to see if he would survive and it inspired me to try and find the leak and to try to patch it. I am sure I do not have to point out the similarity between dropping a fuselage 20,000 feet and repairing an air mattress because it is so obvious! Actually the show always inspires me to creatively think of solutions for problems and broken things to see if I can salvage them. I may not be doing big television show worthy construction normally but I think tonight would have been worthy of a sitcom scene at least. Somehow I managed to find the rip which was decent sized and of course I made it bigger by trying to figure out how I could jerry rig it. The first step was to feel around in the hole to try and see if I could secure some thing on the inside and then cover it with tape. I had managed to find two types of tape: scotch and packing tape. Unfortunately the taping something to the inside was a little problematic so I quickly abandoned that approach. The bad part was now I really did have a decent sized rip because of my exploration. I started brainstorming and lamenting the fact that I didn't have any duct tape. I used to have duct tape as part of my emergency car repair kit back in the VW days and I know it has been used to repair bad hoses and to reattach bumpers. If I had had it I am sure it would have worked. Of the two tapes I did have I thought packing tape would be better so I slapped a few strips across the hole and I started filling the mattress with air. It would not fully inflate and the tape did not want to stick. So I tried the scotch tape and did not have any better luck. I came up with a last ditch effort and concocted a crazy and overly complicated patch that used a combination of both scotch and packing tapes and a couple parking garage receipts. It seemed to be holding by some crazy miracle of my ingenuity (in this case ingenuity is also known as 'cheapness'). I put the sheets back on and laid down on the bed and the patch was holding! It was holding! Until I moved and then I heard "PSSSSSHHHH!" and I was back on the ground. I guess I will hold off on sending my application to Mythbusters, unless I am trying out for Buster's (the crash test dummy) job. I guess tomorrow I will be buying some duct tape...

Are you surprised that I wouldn't just buy a new air mattress or maybe even a bed? Did you miss the part about me being cheap? Or maybe you missed the "I'm poor" part, hehe. If you want to help me out just click this button!