I show up to the job site 52 minutes late. The foreman, a pot long past simmering on a good day, tilts his head as he digs into me. “Well look who decided to grace us with his presence. Where the hell were you?” “Sir, I apologize. I couldn’t sleep. My Eight Sleep stayed hot all night.” He blinks once. “What.” “It sends like… 16GB of sensor data to the cloud to decide if I’m cold or hot. The cloud was down, so the bed just… simmered me.” He looks at me like I just blamed the sun for sweating. “So your bed needs Wi-Fi to know you’re hot?” The whole crew coughs laughter into their gloves. “It collects biometrics,” I add, doubling down like a man who has never met a shovel. “Heart rate, HRV, movement, humidity, and sends them to an AWS server. AWS was down, so the bed wouldn’t let me adjust anything.” “So you got governed by a cloud.” “In a sense, sir, yes.” “Unplug it.” “I can’t.” “Why.” “It’s… on a subscription.” He actually staggers. “You’re RENTING temperature?” “Back in my day,” he says, “a bed was a rectangle and it didn’t email nobody. You got hot, you rolled six inches south.” He pulls a laminated card: APPROVED REASONS FOR TARDINESS. It lists “flat tire,” “bridge out,” “cow in road.” He clicks his pen, adds: ONLINE BED MALFUNCTION. “Thank you, sir,” I say. That night I switch off the bed, put a box fan on a milk crate, and sleep like a rock in airplane mode. Next morning I’m 10 minutes early. He nods at the fan in my passenger seat. “Local solution?” “Local solution,” I say. He tapes the revised card above the time clock. Under ONLINE BED MALFUNCTION he’s added a second line in Sharpie: TRY A FAN. I punch in. The crew snickers. I deserve it. Somewhere, a server farm cools an empty mattress.