Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - HTDE: Sheets and Blankets

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

This week: Ian and Mike help a couple figure out who exactly is responsible for stealing the covers at night.You can email your burning questions to [e-mail] To Do Everything is available without sponsor messages for supporters of Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me+, who also get bonus episodes of Wait Wait Don't…Tell Me! featuring show outtakes, extended guest interviews, and a chance to play an exclusive WW+ quiz game with Peter! Sign up and support NPR at plus.npr.org.How To Do Everything is hosted by Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag. It is produced by Schuyler Swenson. Technical direction from Lorna White.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey guys, it's Peter once again in your wait, wait, wait feed. I am so pleased to present to you another episode of How to Do Everything by Wait, Wait, producers, Ian and Mike. Now, remember, you can only get these episodes of how to do everything in our feed for a short while. So if you love the kind of mysteries that Mike and Ian are revealing, make sure you subscribe to how to do everything at their own feed. Thanks. Hey there, Kevin and Rebecca.

What can we help you with? This is an issue that's been going on for a long time, but we have this thing where we go to bed at night, and we have lined up our sheets and blankets in a way that works for both of us. We make the bed. I mean, the bed is made. We make the bad. Right. The bed is made. Okay.

And it's been reset and everyone is like happy. Sure. And then when we wake up the following morning, almost without. Like I would say 90% of the time, the sheet is pulled towards Rebecca. Uh-huh. And the blanket has been pulled towards me. Whoa. And so she only has sheet and I have blanket.

Well, and in my, I would also say in my defense or in my, well, actually not my defense. I should say my interest is I'm a marriage therapist. And we wake up in the morning. sometimes and we're actually like angry with each other. I'm like, why did you take that whole, why did you take the blanket? Like, what's your problem, you know? And so it, it has sometimes some residual frustrations in the morning, which, you know, I'm sort of like, why do we even have strong feelings about this? How is this happening? I don't know how to make it any better. Yeah. It's fascinating. I mean, plenty of couples. There will be one half of the couple who steals

everything. But whatever is happening between the two of you while you sleep, I have never heard of anything like it before. Yeah, the layering of this makes this very difficult to understand how it happens because, you know, the blanket would be harder for me to access and pull in my sleep. Well, there's a comforter too. Oh, go ahead. Oh, the comforter is there too, but I don't think we have any, we don't seem to pull the comforter. I mean, more than anything, it's the sheet and the blanket that get pulled in different directions.

Well, okay, so let's lay out the case here. So you each have a set side of the bed you sleep on. Who's on the, if we're, I guess, facing the ceiling. Who's on the left? Who's on the right? I'm right. Yes. Okay.

I'm always closer to the door in case of an intruder. Okay. Good. Good. Rebecca, you're laughing awfully hard at that idea. Yeah, I think he's smoking fun at me. I may have used that reasoning in years past. Okay, good.

Good to know. Okay. And what position are the two of you in when you go to sleep first? Like, honestly, about as far away from each other as possible. Okay, but like on your sides turned away from each other, turned towards each other? Yeah, side sleeper turned away. Okay.

And we sound like, I think, probably not affectionate. We really do like each other a lot, but we both need, like, we just need to be when we sleep. Like, when it's time to sleep, it's time to sleep. And we have a really big bed, so we can get a lot of, there's a lot of room. I think that's fair. The fact that you have taken the step of calling us shows us that we, that you love each other.

Are the sheets like super high thread count really nice? Or is the blanket extra fine perfect blanket? Well, I mean, they both have their pluses and minus their bamboo sheets. And the blanket is just a really soft blanket. So, I mean, they're both like, you know. Okay. They're both pretty great, I think. But it doesn't matter what the thread count is if you don't have any sheet.

That's the truth. Yeah. My thread count is zero a lot of nights. Okay, we've got a real mystery here. Yeah, this is good. I like this. We need a detective. Carlo Cotonio is online with us now.

He is the senior VP for investigative and risk mitigation services at Bo Dietl and Associates. In other words, he's a detective. Carlo, how would you approach this case? So we would have their full cooperation and, you know, their consent to perform a full investigation. Yeah. The first step that I would do is, number one, I would want to see the room. I would want to see where the bed is placed, see where any windows are, where any lighting

is, the entrances, how many doors go into it, the square footage, ceiling height, things like that. And then I would try to, you know, being that they're consenting and they're on board with it, I would set up cameras and document the activity at night over the course of a week or so and see how this is happening or if there's something that is unexplainable, then, you know, we'd have a lot more data based on that visual evidence. Oh, like you mean, do you mean something paranormal? I don't know if it's paranormal, but I mean, uh, if my intuition is that either Kevin or Rebecca is someone that moves when they're sleeping and, you know, maybe they get hot at night or maybe

one or the other is moving in a way that's all, you know, wrapping the sheet around Rebecca and the blanket around Kevin. Yeah. That seems like the most likely... What's been so flummoxing to them is that the blanket and the sheet are starting out together. So they can't figure out how it is that Rebecca is ending up with the entirety of the sheet and Kevin has all of the blanket. Yeah, I see the confusion there because, you know, it's...

If you're making the bed, you're getting into bed at a certain time. You know, I also want to kind of ask them questions about their bedtime routine. Who goes to sleep first? Right. Is it a new bed? Is it a new bedding set? Is it a new sheet? I could tell you, Carlo, I think these are bamboo sheets.

What does that do? Okay. I would like to see how it behaves and, you know, is it more slippery than, you know, cotton sheets or a blend? Yeah. So you might go back and build the bed in the lab and experiment with how bamboo sheets might work. Yeah, I mean, I would even say to just see what would happen if you changed the bedding, if you tried different sheets. All of that could have a different effect on how your body, you know, adheres to the material.

If you were on this case and you, the first time you sat down with Kevin and Rebecca, would one of the questions you asked them be, do you have any enemies? Anybody out there who would want to do you harm? Would that be a question you would ask? In this particular circumstance, I don't think we'd need to go that far. But in the interest of being as thorough as possible, I would ask that. Yeah. But this case is pretty, to me, seems very solvable. Yeah, it does, doesn't it?

I imagine in a lot of stakeouts, it's just a lot of dead time. You're just hanging out. what are you going to be eating or drinking during this time? So the stakeout, I mean, if they want me personally there, to, you know, have a human eye on it, you know, that's a different story. That would be a first. I've never been invited into a client's bedroom for a week. But, you know, if I were to, I would be very respectful. I wouldn't eat or drink while they're sleeping.

And I'd try to be as quiet as possible to, you know, minimize any disruptions and affect any of the results. Well, Carlo, thank you so much for helping us help Kevin and Rebecca. Oh, I mean, I would love to help Kevin and Rebecca. This would be a pleasure to work on many of the cases that I'm working with. Unfortunately, involve a lot higher stakes, but this one seems like a fun one. It seems like it's solvable, and it seems like it's something that I would be able to definitely provide some answers to Kevin and Rebecca on. And if nothing else, we can invest in a $30 nanny cam, which may solve all our problems. For something like this, that would be my first recommendation.

Thank you for a call. B&H. This is a sales operator. I'm in the regular call. Hi, I need to buy a camera. Sure. So I'll connect it with our photo department. Just a moment, please. Thank you. BNH photo, Wilson speaking. Hey, Wilson, I'm in the market for like a nanny cam. Is that something you could help me with? Nanny cam. Like a camera that you can, like, set up in a room and monitor?

I got it. Okay, not me. Do you probably want to speak to our surveillance people handle that stuff? Could you hold on one minute, please? I can get you to them. This is Ezra in the surveillance department. How may I assist you today? Hey, Ezra.

We're looking for, I guess you'd call it a nanny cam. What's the, what are the prices on, like, an entry-level nanny cam? Like a hidden camera? It doesn't have to be hidden. It's really, we have a situation where we're trying to monitor people sleeping overnight. Gotcha. Do you have Wi-Fi at the location? Yeah. We're trying to investigate if a couple, who is stealing the covers in a married couple?

Will this have a wide enough sweep to capture all that action? So the camera that I typically recommend Sorry, I put it in the wrong part number What was it? So the camera that I would normally That I typically recommend Is got like a 100 degree horizontal field of view So if you mount the camera

And as close to the corner as you can Of the room, you'll see the entire room And it's going to be dark, it's nighttime. Is that going to be a problem? It has night vision infrared that can reach up to 30 feet away Wow, okay Let me ask you this question, Ezra. On the off chance that there is some paranormal activity going on,

will we be able to capture that with this camera? That I don't know. I can't answer that question, unfortunately. Which camera does capture that? I have no clue. All right. Do you want me to give you that part number of this camera? You can take a look at it?

Yeah, yeah. What's that part number? It's Tia's in Tango. Pia's in Papa. Tia's in tango. A and no. Hello? Hello. Is that Kevin? This is Kevin, yeah. And I'm here with Rebecca.

Hello. Hey, how's it going? We're good. We're good. Yeah, how'd you sleep last night? We're still together. We're still together. That's good. Yeah, but I would say, though, there's something about sort of like bringing it up that has made it. I'm like almost more aware of the sheet blanket issue. Yeah.

Okay. Oh, boy. Okay. I think I'm twirling. I think I'm like, I think I sort of grab the sheet and like twirl it around my body. I don't know. Okay. So maybe it's gotten worse.

I don't know if it's worse. I think we're more, maybe like, reignited our awareness of it. Okay. There's less acceptance. Well, thank you both for getting back on the phone. We have an update. We've made some progress, and we want to get your buy-in on some potential next steps. Okay.

Okay. Well, we just got off the phone with a private investigator who investigates crime scenes and cold cases. And we laid out everything for him. And his recommendation is that for the next. step, we send you all a camera and you film a night of sleep. And then Mike and I review the footage. Okay. Are you willing to do that?

I feel like, yeah, I mean, yes, but it makes me a little nervous that I'm going to like, it's going to be my fault. Oh. Oh. Really? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, curiosity always gets the better of judgment. So, yeah, I'd say fire up the camera. All right. Well, let this be a verbal confirmation that you have agreed to let us watch surveillance tape of you sleeping. Let it be that. Perfect.

All right. So we have sent a surveillance camera to Kevin and Rebecca. They're going to set it up and they're going to send us the footage. We're going to take a short break, and when we come back, we're going to review the evidence. Again, this is two adults sleeping in their beds at night. And we're going to watch. Hey, if you have a question and you need some help answering it, maybe you want us to surveil your nighttime routine. Send us your questions, send them to us at how to at npr.org.

Hey, you never know. We may already be watching you with a secret camera in anticipation of your question. On the last episode, we did a little thing after talking about Dolbear's law. That's the law that allows you to figure out the temperature based on tree cricket chirps. We had played a game where you all had to tell us what the temperature was of the episode. Hundreds upon hundreds of you wrote in. So many people wrote in. So many people got it right.

The answer, Ian, 56 degrees. A temperature, which would probably kill crickets. Sorry, crickets. But congratulations to Patty B., who was the first one with the right answer. Patty B., we're going to send you a T-shirt. Patty also said, I read an interesting story recently about a man who got horribly ill from kissing his pet bird. Came down with a case of chirpies.

Oh, I don't know if that's a true story or not. We wish your friend all the best, Patty. I also want to acknowledge Sam, 12 years old. Sam wrote in and gave us the score. Sam, we're going to send you a T-shirt too. Congratulations, Sam. And finally, we want to acknowledge Cheryl, who was the last person to guess. And guess what, Cheryl?

We're going to send you a T-shirt, too, because we have a bunch of shirts. I don't even know what's on these shirts. These could be, wait, wait, don't tell me shirts. Maybe we have some old how-to-do-everything shirts. We have a closet that's got a bunch of outdated merchandise. Good news, everybody. You're getting some of it. Some outdated merch.

And some of these will be game worn by Peter Sagle. Think about that, a guy who likes to run. Okay, we have just received, via email, a lot of video of Kevin and Rebecca sleeping. Okay, so it is, looks like they're getting ready for bed. It's about 946, which I feel like, nice job, nice and early. I'll say one thing I'm noticing here is how much Kevin is looking directly into the camera. So there may be some observer paradox that we are actually influencing the experiment here. And I just want to add, I'm glad he's not more comfortable.

You know, I can only sleep if there are two strangers watching me on camera. Yeah, that'd be weird. All right, it's now 236 a.m. seeing a lot of movement from Kevin here. Yeah. Rebecca's position has changed. Oh, and it's changing again. Oh, okay.

She has a lot of nighttime leg action. She now has one knee up. They didn't tell us, but she wears a sleep mask. Yeah. Which only would enable Kevin to do his bidding without her knowing. Oh, that's true. Yeah. She's technically blindfolded.

Yeah, we've got this very, very surveillance-y kind of fish-eye lens and a very good view of the bed. Although it cuts off the very bottom. So if anything is happening with feet, if feet are the culprit here, we're not going to know. Basically, the view that we have is if you're, if you had a TV that was across from your bed, like in a hotel room, if the TV was watching you, sleep. That's the view we have here. And I think that in any hotel room, that's a pretty good bed is that there's a camera on the TV watching you. Oh, okay. I see some foot movement from Kevin.

I think it's a mob. Just flew by the camera, too? Did you see that? Yeah, some sort of moth or specter. There it is again. All right. It feels like a separate problem, but Kevin and Rebecca, your room is haunted. What a lot of people who listen to our show don't realize is that for every question that is sent to us, we ask people to send us a video of them sleeping to help us better answer their problems.

And I got to tell you, you know who's a sound sleeper is autumn's? I'm not getting any audio, so it's pretty quiet, pretty quiet in the room. I think we just assume she's making a honk shoe sound. We can actually go ahead and add a little bit of that. Okay, that helps. That leg movement, though, without any arm. Now there's some arm movement. Okay, hold on.

Here we go. Oh, goodness. We shouldn't see this. No. Okay. I feel bad. Rebecca has now, she just, she just pushed the covers down and she is on top of the cover. She has no covering on at this point at 237 in the morning.

So what we're seeing. Yeah. Kevin, fully comfortable under both blanket and sheet. And Rebecca out in the open on top of everything. Okay. Oh, there it goes Kevin. Is he sleepwalking? Oh.

Are there birds in that room? It feels like it might be confetti. Although, as somebody who watches a child on a monitor from time to time, you do just get weird. Weird effects. Oh. My child. I just want to be clear.

I'm not just watching a random child on a monitor. Too late. I can't tell what's happening here. Oh. left the bed. She sat up, she pushed the blanket down. Yeah. And pulled the sheet up.

I don't know. Tell me what you think. I feel like we know what happens. We know what's going on. Yeah. And I think we know what to tell them. All right. Oh. Hey, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you?

Hello. Oh, good. There's Rebecca. Nice. Yep. Yep. First of all, let me just say, thank you for agreeing to let us watch you sleep. maybe neither maybe none of us in this situation appreciated just how vulnerable and intimate

this would this would be yeah yeah I think that would be yeah I was really totally felt comfortable and then it came time to it and then I was like

yeah it felt a little bit exposing if it makes you feel better I also felt very uncomfortable watching. But all that said, I do think after watching, reviewing the footage, I do think we have a pretty good hypothesis for what's going on here. Ooh, yeah, we're very curious to hear. Yeah.

So what we think is happening is you're getting, the comforter is making you too hot, Rebecca. Yeah. You're kicking everything off of you. Yeah. And then at some point, you're then, because you have nothing on you, you're getting too cold again. But you don't want to get too hot again. So you just grab the sheet and pull that up over you. Yeah.

Okay. And we saw it happen when Kevin was not in the bed. And so either what's happening is the jostling of him getting out of bed to go to the bathroom or whatever. That's waking you enough that you notice your. temperature is not quite right. Or Kevin is a heat source, and when he leaves, that's when you need the sheet. So either way, it's his fault. Well, I don't know that it's really...

I don't know that it's anyone's fault, right? Like, you get cold, you pull the sheet up, Kevin returns to the bed. Maybe your grip on the sheet is so tight. You've got this, you know, Gallum-like strength on it. And he has no choice. He grabs the comforter. He's left with no other options. No other option.

And so what we see in that video is Rebecca, turn facing outward with the sheet, Kevin facing the other way with the comforter. Yeah. The thing that was so confusing to both of us was how the sheet and the blanket moved in opposite directions. But when you understand that she separates the sheet from the blanket,

right, right. It sort of starts to make more sense, and then we both become pullers of our respective layer. Yeah. We are all but pullers of our respective layer in this world. If I were to give a prescription here, I think you got to get rid of your comforter. I think the comforter is the root of the problems.

Interesting. That's like a down comforter. And we're, you know, we're in the north. So it's cold. And so we're going to be switching here soon to a lighter comforter. And, you know, maybe that will, maybe it'll be different. But I will have to see. We'll have to check that out.

I could tell it was a heavy comforter just from the violence with which you kicked it off of yourself. I was really. angry. I'm really angry if I'm too hot. Yeah. That's been one of the, when we have argued about this. Yeah. I have told her several times you don't actually need to throw the blankets off. You can just remove. It's fascinating because I do think one of the things that people say is you never know, you never actually know what's going on in a marriage. And I feel like, you know what? Ian and I do. Yeah, we do. We've seen it. Yeah, we've seen it. Yeah.

All right. Kevin and Rebecca, thank you so much, and we hope you sleep well tonight. Thank you, Mike Ian. Take care. All right, bye, everybody. Bye-bye. Well, that does it for this week's show. What did you learn, Ian?

Well, I'll say this. You know, in Gmail when you're sending somebody an email and it suggests, the AI, suggests some possible responses, When we got all this video of Kevin and Rebecca, two strangers sleeping. Yeah. The first suggested response from, I guess, Google Gemini to me, was to reply to them, so cute. What did you respond to them with? I didn't. I don't know if the four of us, you and me and Kevin and Rebecca, can ever speak to each other again after the things we've seen.

Do you think, would you feel kind of? comfortable now watching uh watching Rebecca and Kevin sleep. Do you think we could fit in there Willy Wonka style, the four of us? It's a big bed. It's a big bed. As they both said,

while they love each other very much, they left a lot of room in between them. I love that we'd be in between them in this fantasy. It's not exactly the layout I had in mind. I just love that you had a layout in mind. How to Do Everything is produced by

Skyler Swinson with technical direction from Lorna White. Our interns this week are Kevin and Rebecca. Get us your questions at how-to at npr.org. I'm Ian and I'm Mike. Right.