Survival Skills

Yesterday we went bed shopping. Bed shopping would have to be the greatest form of shopping possible. I say this because it is the laziest form of shopping possible, and I’m all about maximum laziness.

Basically, bed shopping involves sitting in the car until you get to the bed shop, then lying down on lots of super comfy beds for extended periods of time. Finally, after lying down all day, you pick whichever bed was the comfiest, and then you go home where you either sit down on the couch, or go to bed. In my case I decided to nap on the couch, because it’s way comfier than our bed, which is completely stuffed. Stuffed in the broken sense, that is – not in the full of stuffing sense.

Can shopping really get much lazier than that?

The worst part is that after picking the most comfortable mattress our budget would allow for, we had to come home to our crappy mattress with all of its lumps and dents. The new mattress won’t arrive for about 4-6 weeks. So last night my body threw a tantrum at having to sleep on the crap mattress after spending all day on something that is so much better. It knows that something more comfortable is coming along.


The sales guy that helped us pick out the bed was a mattress guru. He knew everything about mattresses. I always wonder about people who have become experts in their field, especially when it’s something so specific. I mean, this guy knew everything possible about mattresses, posture, spinal alignment. He could also tell how much we both weighed by looking at us - but that’s a whole other story (suffice to say that as far as women are concerned, this is not a desirable skill for a man to possess).

It strikes me often how random it is to be such a specialist at something that is so entirely non-essential. I’m exactly the same - I know bucket loads about playgrounds and playground equipment. I know about standards in different countries, entrapments and safety surfaces. I know about materials and UV ratings of plastics and all sorts of completely random junk that is specific to one tiny industry. What I’m getting at here is hard to explain, but I guess it just seems kind of odd that such a level of expertise can exist entirely as a result of consumerism.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that we suddenly found ourselves in a ‘Tomorrow When The War Began’ kind of situation, and the country was taken over by some nameless foreign army. Everyone had to stop working and our lives just became all about surviving. If we had to rate the usefulness of each person’s skill set in a survival situation like that, I’m guessing that skills like ‘supreme playground knowledge’ and ‘mattress guru’ are probably going to be pretty low on the list.

If we were in a ‘Lost’ kind of situation and skills like medical training and weapons use became essential, a computer nerd like me would probably be one of the first to die a horrible death in aid of setting up the story.
Although, I guess to be fair I would kick arse at the whole computer/button pushing thing. But after that my days would be numbered.

I guess what I find the weirdest is that there are so many people who are exactly like me – and we far outweigh the people with the essential survival skills. Maybe I need to learn some kind of useful survival skill that would make me indispensable in an emergency. But what would that skill be? Is one useful skill enough to override a plethora of absolutely pointless knowledge? And most importantly, can I learn this new skill without compromising my supreme laziness?