What Goes "Snap" in the Middle of the Night?

Ok, here is our bed saga:

I got married on 24 November 2007. After our honeymoon in Fiji, we went bed shopping and chose a king size bed from Harvey Norman which was exactly what we were looking for.

One small problem… three nights after we got it, the damn thing broke! yep, the center beam (which was wooden) that holds up all the slats gave an almighty crack and snapped in half. There were three legs that supported the center beam and they ripped out of the beam. It wasn’t like I had spent 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon setting up the bed when I could have been watching the cricket!

So what was the vigorous activity we were engaged in when the bed broke…? Well being a newly wed couple… nah, there’s no funny story here. I just sat up in bed and i must have put the right pressure at the right point, or wrong, depending on how you look at it. I was only 95 kg at the time!

After speaking to the Harvey Norman rep, we found out that this was by no means the first time this had happened for this model. Wish we had been told that before we spent thousands of dollars buying it!

Ok, so after a number of phone calls to Harvey Norman and three weeks later (with us sleeping on a “single size” mattress in one of our spare rooms – my bed before we got married), we finally got a new center beam sent to us. Yep, it was wooden (you’d think we’d learned the first time!). What do you know but that started to sound like it was splintering a week or so later. But we had been careful not to be too vigorous this time!

We called Harvey Norman again saying that the new beam was no good – the same thing was happening to us and we expected it would break soon. A week later, still hearing nothing, we called them up again and were told that they had got a metal beam in the day after we had last spoken to them. I guess they just couldn’t be bothered helping us fix the mess their product had created.

As luck would have it, on the night that we got the metal beam, the wooden one snapped. Same as last time. Likewise, no funny story here…

When I went to fit the shiny new metal beam… who’d have thought… they didn’t give us any legs. We couldn’t put the metal beam in as it would have no support and wouldn’t even last a night. Sure enough, the legs that we had would not fit the new metal beam. So it was back to the mattress for us again! However, this time, the spare room had been converted into a piano room for my wife’s numerous private students. Mattress in the lounge room. Hooray.

We called Harvey Norman the next morning and were told that they didn’t think to ship legs, so the legs were over the other side of the country and would have to be specially sent to our local store. We would be called when the legs arrived. Yes, this store is in Perth, one of the major cities in Australia.

Another week on the mattress went by, hearing nothing from Harvey Norman. Little did we know that five minutes down the road, the legs sat waiting for us. When we had heard nothing, we figured something must have happened, so we called and wow, the legs were there. After I got home from work I set to fixing this headache of a bed.

Soon after ripping the bed apart to remove the splinters of the previous beam, it became apparent that, I kid you not, the legs were obviously not designed for this bed, as they were about 5 cm too long. No big deal, except that at that height, there is no sideways support for the beam. It’s too high to fit into the grooves that are meant to hold it.

And so here we are… married for a couple of months, yet again, two people sleeping on a mattress made for one person while our magnificent king size bed lies in ruins. I guess we’ll call Harvey Norman tomorrow morning and sort something out. I expect we’ll still be sleeping in the lounge room in two weeks time. I’ll have to get the wife to call them, I know I’d probably just threaten them with a lawsuit for the sheer inconvenience they have caused (to say nothing of the *ahem* married life).

Ah well, whoever said “life is an adventure”… should have been shot.