Sure, whinging about celebrities and despising fellow commuters makes for a stranger profession than – say – building, plumbing or teaching, but there are some jobs out there that confuse with their sheer mundanity. You know, the positions you think someone straight out of school with no prospects might get into for beer and rent money before they realise how boring and unfulfilling it actually is and go work with cars or have a crack at tertiary education (or both).

There are so many businesses in the world it seems impossible for anyone to be passionate about – stuff that arguably fills a need in our society, but not in the same rewarding way cooking or cleaning does.

For instance, what drives a person to sell beds? How does a mattress salesperson drag themselves out from under their soft Egyptian cotton sheets and off their back-massaging, shoulder blade-caressing Sealy Posturepedic every morning of the week?

Of all the employed positions a person can be called up to, what kind of human being develops an interest in sleeping arrangements to such an unhealthy degree? Where does the deep fascination with the pyjamaed affairs of strangers derive? And does connecting the right person with the right shock-absorbing box spring give a sense of enormous wellbeing and accomplishment to the would-be sleep doctor?

My guess is they’re all insomniacs, relentlessly searching for the perfect pillow upon which to rest their weary heads, using customers as guinea pigs in their sick exploration of the darkest recesses of REM sleep.

Either that or they’re incredibly lazy, and dreamt of sneaking catnaps on the floor stock between customer enquiries. I bet they had it all planned out – if the manager catches them grabbing forty winks at Forty Winks, they could claim they were stress testing the goods or building product knowledge.

Maybe some of them grew up glued to the television, eagerly awaiting the next high-energy advertisement from Rod ‘Cap’n Snooze’ Quantock.

“One day,” they’d tell their beaming parents, “I’m gonna grow a beard and go to work in a red nightshirt and cap.”

Thinking about it now, I can see some benefits to selling beds. I bet there are loads of gags you could run on blushing newlyweds, for starters. Then there’s the chance some foxy tart with Scarlett Johansson cleavage will come in while you’re alone in the shop and demand to be shown exactly how a certain model handles “vigorous action” if you know what she means.

Of course, there’s the same danger attached to any job that deals with a product or service most people deal with in small doses. Like the ice-cream maker who can’t stand the stuff, you could end up so sick of ionic memory foam and snore-reducing technology that you’d sleep on a two-seater couch with a corduroy cushion for a pillow and a scratchy old throw rug for warmth.