When Hurricane Rita caused everyone to evacuate Houston, I spent 17 hours on the road with my family. My wife was seven and a half months pregnant. My oldest was three and a half years old. Somehow we got to the Comfort Suites Inn in Burleson, Texas, and I got a speeding ticket 10 minutes before we got there. I fully expected the officer to say, "Hey, I know it was a rough day for y'all evacuating. I'm gonna give you a warning, but now I got a ticket."
When I got to the hotel, I couldn't sleep. Still pissed about the ticket. The Stallion management team had faxed me a bunch of information on an oil and gas deal. Quite frankly, I'd forgotten they were gonna send it to the hotel ( that's a generous description of the Comfort Suites Inn in Burleson, Texas). I crunched the numbers; it was the best deal I'd seen in forever. I called my business partner Mike, who had evacuated to Kansas, and said, "Dude, we gotta take a look at this deal; there's something wrong."
Anyway, we all rendezvoused 48 hours later in a conference room in Dallas. I was in flip-flops and a T-shirt. Mike, at least, had the class to go to the gift store and buy a nice shirt, and we met with management and spent six hours going through their deal. We wrote terms on a napkin, shook hands, and eight days later we wired them $32 million. We wound up making four times our money in 18 months. We still refer to this as the hurricane deal.
@hartenergy named it deal of the year.