I Broke the Pump!

Okay, so it turns out it really wasn’t my fault, but I just about died last night when I was changing the fullness of my air chamber in the bed last night and I heard this awful, loud SNAP! Needless to say, after that, the pump system no longer worked. For either side. D’oh!

Terry ripped the pump unit out of the bed this morning, brought it downstairs and proclaimed, “It’s not sounding too good” as he shakes the pump unit and we hear this rattling of miscellaneous broken parts inside. Double d’oh! He unscrews it, pulls the fan section apart and finds that all 7 of the fan blades have indeed snapped off, one into two separate pieces, even. Now, honestly, if you’re going to put a 20 year warranty on a bed (we have the Nautilus Sleep System), who in their right mind would make the fan blades out of plastic? I mean, really… duh!

So, at this point, we seemingly have several options:

1. Say “screw it” and dump the old bed, sleeping in the spare bedroom until we get a new bed.
2. Say “screw it” and rip the now deflated and defective mattress off of our bed and put the smaller (full size) inflatable mattress onto our foundation until we get a new bed.
3. Glue the fan blades back onto the motor and cross our fingers that they stay intact long enough to reinflate the bed so that we can sleep on it long enough to get a new bed. (P.S. Saying “screw it” is implied.)
4. Follow above scenario and call customer service to get the pump unit replaced.
5. Say “to heck with it” and sleep on the floor. No new bed required.

Obviously, the last scenario is not actually going to happen. 😆 In the interest of saving money, we start with scenario number 4. We go out their website (notice that their domain name is “thebestbed.com” – we aren’t conceited or anything, are we – and find this lovely message. “We’re sorry, but the Nautilus® FitRest™ and Nautilus® Sleep Systems Mattress Series are no longer available for sale online. ” Uh-huh. Reading between the lines, I’m figuring that they are no longer selling the Nautilus Sleep Systems at all. And I might be correct. I call the lovely 800 number listed to speak with one of their “friendly, helpful and world class (according to their phone menu) customer service representatives and sit on hold for 20 minutes. At this point, we figure that there actually isn’t anyone answering the phones because it’s a weekend and they didn’t bother to have a message to that effect, so we leave a message for them to call us back. The aforementioned 20 year warranty will hopefully cover the pump, provided we can get in touch with customer service. I remain optimistic because we got good service from them before (though that was early on and we’ve had the bed for more than 5 years now). So, the plan for now is to hope that the fan holds long enough … oh, wait, Terry just plugged it in and fan blade pieces immediately flew EVERYWHERE!

So, we’ll be sleeping in another bed for a little while until we either get the fan replaced or another bed ordered. We’re probably looking at a couple of weeks. I’m not sure I like the spare bedroom enough to live in there for two weeks, so I think we’ll be putting the air mattress onto our frame. If all else fails, I’ll go out and buy a queen sized air mattress for $100 until we find a solution. A new Select Comfort mattress is going to cost us $2500, so I’m hoping not to have to buy one. I’d be a little irritated if we have to spend our tax refund on a new bed instead of bedroom furniture. 😕

In other news, I gave myself a serious attitude adjustment last night. Terry was working really late (good thing I opted to work from home yesterday, for that exact reason) and I was bored out of my mind. I was tired of working on my laptop and tired of watching TV, so I turned on the Playstation 2 and did a workout to DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) for 35 minutes or so. Still bored, I went upstairs, washed up and decided to take Terry’s truck and go out to the grocery store. At 9 PM, the grocery store is a fairly empty place, which was nice. I even went and had some prescriptions filled at the nearby CVS while I was at it. I returned home, sliced up the bread I had baked in the machine earlier (which created a really tiny, dense loaf of sourdough because the yeast apparently failed) and made some soup. Terry turned up around 10 PM. I was really pretty mad, but here’s where the attitude adjustment came into play. I figured I could lay into him as soon as he walked in the door about being so late, not giving me any updates, etc. And I could be mad the rest of the night and go to bed mad, making us both miserable. OR … I could be happy to see him, feed him and pamper him after a long day at work. There’s a huge chasm of difference between the two. One does neither one of us any good and the other embraces a loving attitude that helps us both. Guess which one I chose? 😀 And I am much happier for having made the right choice. I was able to treat him well and still express my displeasure over specific points that he could have controlled (i.e. the not calling me and letting me know how things were going from time to time) in a rational manner. I feel really good about how I handled it, considering how badly I could have easily let the situation become. Yay me! 😉