Apr 26, 2016 4 min read

I love the 1940s: Great decade – if you overlook that World War thing. The cars were wonderful – stylish, and big enough to cram all the initial candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination into one coupe.

And Forties fashions were amazing. Women dressed up even when they dressed down. Their closets didn’t look like a Frederick’s of Hollywood had exploded. The well-dressed man wore a fedora, even if he was digging a ditch. For business, he donned a starched white dress shirt and a tie so wide that small planes sometimes attempted to land on it. His suit coat had enough shoulder padding to stuff a mattress. And finding out how that mattress was being used when you weren’t home was a job for a hard-boiled private detective, not a cellphone app.

Who hasn’t seen a film noir classic in which a shamus like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe is contracted by a suspicious husband or wife to tail a spouse suspected of cheating? It was great fodder for pulp fiction, and great for movie trailers: kick open a bedroom door and take snapshots of the couple in flagrante delicto.

But Durmet, a manufacturing company based in Spain, apparently has decided that all this hiring and tailing and snapping is just too much work for today’s tech-savvy cuckolds and cuckqueens. So they’ve invented Smarttress, a mattress that uses electronic sensors to send a message to your cellphone if they detect motion on the mattress while you’re away from home.

The YouTube video that announces Smarttress should be up for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject Documentary – or maybe Best Comedy. Ominous music worthy of the latest Marvel superhero epic underscores dramatic cut shots of men and women in various states of, um, interaction. Clothes and wedding rings fall to the floor; male and female faces exhibit worry and shock. Over these scenes appear dire headlines: “The global infidelity crisis knocks on your door … reaches your room … and even your OWN BED. Having peace of mind in a relationship is not easy … UNTIL NOW.” A cellphone beeps. A message scrolls into view: “Mattress is being used.” The music becomes heroic.

Whew! I tell ya, I expected the trailer to reveal that in the upcoming “Captain America: Civil War,” Ironman and Cap square off because Bucky’s been hitting on Pepper Pots.

No such luck. The video then becomes a not-so-subtle blurb for “the first mattress to detect deception,” one that will warn you if it is “being used in a suspicious way.”

Now, to me – and remember, I love the Forties – my mattress being used in a suspicious way would involve a gang of hoods dressed in baggy wool suits and bulletproof vests breaking into my house and throwing my Posturepedic up against the window as a shield against a rival gang’s Tommy-gun fusillade. But Spaniards apparently have even more vivid imaginations. I mean, Don Quixote, right?

The video goes on to state that Smarttress’s associated cellphone app has a speedometer that provides “intensity and impact per minute” readouts. It is, Durmet claims, “the only mattress that WILL LET YOU REST 24 HOURS … comfortable AT NIGHT … reassuring DURING THE DAY.” The video ends with a great tagline: “If your partner isn’t faithful, at least your mattress is.”

Yet, though Durmet may be well-intentioned, I see potential problems with Smarttress.

You’re hard at work at the office, as is – you believe – your spouse. Your cellphone beeps. “Mattress is being used.” You bolt from your desk, careen down the expressway at 90 mph, screech to a halt in your driveway, kick open your front door and charge up the stairs to the bedroom.

Where your Great Dane is happily rolling on his back on the bed.

Ruh roh!