After last night’s Dolby seminar (or sometime around 9:40 pm), I checked into the Mark Hopkins hotel. A youngish desk clerk gave me two pass cards to a room on the sixth floor. I went up there, slipped the plastic card into the door slot, and walked in. The first thing I saw was a short hallway with a right-turn ahead — obviously a fairly big room. But the TV was already on…strange. I took the turn and came upon a middle-aged couple lying on the bed, watching CNN.

They stiffened and sat up and said “Oh, Jesus!,” “My God!”, “What are you doing?” and expressions to that effect. The guy leapt off the bed to defend the territory and his lady. “Whoa, whoa….sorry!” I hurriedly said, holding up my hands. “I was given keys to this room by the desk. It’s a mistake. Obviously I got in with the card so I didn’t break in. Truly sorry.” The guy collected himself and acknowledged that a mistake had clearly been made, and I turned right around and bolted the hell out of there.

The desk clerk was shocked, ashen-faced. “You are Jeffrey Wells, right?” Definitely, I said, and showed him my ID. He apologized and double-checked. Believe it or not, the name of the guy I walked in on is also named Jeffrey Wells. Same name, same hotel…what are the odds? I wasn’t pissed — just amazed and amused. The clerk smiled and said “Thanks for being understanding” as he gave me the cards for the new room, which is on the third floor.

My current room is about half the size of the other Jeffrey Wells’ room. It feels like the garbage-compression room in Star Wars — i.e., the room that Han, Leia and Luke are stuck in as the walls start moving in and making the room smaller and tighter by the second.

If Nancy Meyers had written and directed the scene when I walk in on the other Jeffrey Wells, he and his wife would have been obese tourists from Missouri and having some kind of contortionist sex on the bed. As I turned the corner and stood before them they would have both leapt off the bed with terrified expressions and gone “Aaaaaahhh! Aaaaaahhh!” And I would have stood there and also gone “Aaaaaahhh! Aaaaaahhh!” And then the hotel dicks would be knocking on the door and I’d be cuffed for breaking into a room, etc.