My House Guest From France

I sometimes get hundreds of emails in a day, and often fall behind answering them all (though I do try!). I just found an email from a woman with whom I had one of the single strangest interactions of my life.

A few weeks back, I'd met my friend, James Altucher, out for a drink on a Wednesday night at the midtown W Hotel where he was staying. I've gone to this W Hotel before and it's a nice, mellow, relatively upscale place with lots of good looking 30-40ish folks.

James gets a phone call and walks off to take it. Just then I see this cute little dog and its owner in the lobby next to where I'm standing. I step over and say hi to the pretty woman who owns the dog and kneel down to pet the little guy. We strike up a conversation -- the woman and I, not the dog and I -- and James comes back and we invite her to have a drink with us, as we learn that she's just landed here for a six month job assignment from Paris (though she's from the South, surprisingly enough) and is supposed to stay at the W for a week until her apartment is ready.

It turns out that the W had overbooked and couldn't get her a room. So they had been calling hotels all over the city trying to find her a place to stay. They finally find her a couple places (she'd been waiting for hours, I guess) and James and I help her with her 39 bags all weighing approximately the weight of eight dead babies (wonder what actually was in those bags!) into a cab. She asks if either James or I would mind helping her to the next hotel, so, being the gentleman I am, I oblige.

At the next hotel, it turns out they're booked after all. This poor woman had left her apartment to move to NYC like 14 hours prior and is emotionally and physically exhausted. She's got tears in her eyes as she comes out of this hotel's lobby. I tell her, "Look, if the next place can't put you up, you could just crash at my apartment if you needed to." I, of course, didn't really think she'd ever take me up on such an offer under such circumstances, but I did mean it and she smiled in relief. So she calls the hotel that was supposedly open and they tell her they have rooms -- for $500 a night.

Such a rate's not terribly outrageous in NYC in the summer, but it ain't cheap neither. And she tells them on the phone that she's running her own business and that $500 is just too much. They tell her that's all they can offer. She politely says no (much to my surprise, I must say).

So then she turns to me and says, "Okay, where did you say you live?"

Well, as a matter of fact, I was actually scheduled to meet a woman for drinks at 11pm near Union Square, which is near to where I live. So I tell her both of those facts and she's like, "Okay, sounds fine. Let's go." LOL!

We cab it downtown to my place and I help her carry those 287 bags she has with her up to my apartment (using an elevator, of course, but it was still work, man!). I convince her to take my bed and let me sleep in my living room on my couch. I step into the bathroom to clean up from all this moving before my date (for which I was now late). By the time I come out of the bathroom five minutes later, she's already fast asleep in her clothes on my bed.

I go meet my friend for drinks, and get home late at like 1:30am or so. I sleep on the couch and wake up as I almost always do at about 5 or 6am (I don't even have an alarm clock in my apartment). She wakes up a little bit later and we have a cup of coffee and then each head off to some meetings. She later picked up all her 1,304 bags to go to her hotel.

I had her number, but hadn't gotten around to calling it. And here I am today just trying to catch up on all my emails and found one from her from the very next day, saying that she wanted to send me a gift. How nice.

Only in NYC?