While most of the mattresses you sleep are tested by machines, some mattress companies actually pay grown adults real money to jump up and down on their product before it ships to stores.

“It’s work,” one mattress-jumper at San Francisco’s McRoskey mattresses tells the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s not for everybody. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it.”

The McRoskey jumper isn’t just amusing himself by bouncing around on the handmade mattress that retails for upward of $2,750. Rather, he’s both compressing all the mattress’ layers of batting and meticulously checking for lumps and imperfections — one jump at a time.

Each jumped-on mattress is covered with a protective mat so that the jumper’s feet don’t make direct contact with the nearly finished product because even if his feet are clean… better safe than stinky.

The Chronicle describes the process:

Then [he] steps onto the middle of one edge and jumps five steps forward and five steps back. He works a precise grid pattern, covering each section of the surface once, like an Augusta groundskeeper mowing the 18th green before the Masters.

Up, down, sidestep. Up, down, sidestep. One hundred bounces. Flip the mattress over and jump 100 more jumps on the other side.

After the mattress is properly bounced, it’s off to the giant stitching machine for all the final sewing. If the jumpers have done their job properly, the mattress will fit just-so into the stitcher. If it has not been sufficiently jumped-on, errant lump of batting could wreak havoc and cause the mattress to go back a few steps in the process.

“This is not a game,” says the jumper, who also assembles the mattresses before getting paid to bounce. “Not to me.”

McRoskey mattress jumping is serious work [SFgate.com]

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