I was so excited about New Year's this year. The first that I'd be home for in a couple years, and it had the potential to be awesome. My best friend Megan and I decided to do something different. Usually we go to a house party, but this year we decided on a formal party being put on by a local radio station, mostly so we could buy new dresses. We booked a hotel room with a couple other girls, bought pretty things to wear and champagne to drink, and looked forward to partying. The weather forecast, saying there'd be a blizzard that night was no deterrent to us.
We had a few problems: one girl forgot her ticket and had to call around to find another way to get in (an awesome girl from the radio station offered her a free ticket), then once we arrived to the party, we realized we still only had 3 tickets (the fourth was in an envelope in the hotel room, so someone went back for it). Still, even with these problems and a long wait to get inside and check our coats, we anticipated a fun evening.
There was a red carpet inside, where a professional photographer was taking photos, so we posed for a couple. We got drinks and headed for the dance floor. I actually had a pretty good time dancing, and when the countdown began, we didn't realize that it was actually 12:04. We stuck around for awhile after, and went to get our coats at about 1:45 or so. This is when the trouble began (for us anyway... apparently people had already been waiting since 12:30 for coats that still weren't materializing). It seems that the coatcheck was understaffed AND the coats hadn't been put away in any particular order so the staff had to look through ALL the coats to find each one. I'm not sure exactly what time it happened, but at some point, people got tired of waiting for coats (and some had been told that their coats couldn't be found), and jumped over the tables that were in between the crowd and the coats and rifling through them. Coats were thrown on the floor and trampled, and eventually security took all the coats to a back room (where they should've been in the first place!) and we were made to wait... and wait. People were drunk and pissed off, so lots of fights broke out... the fire alarm went off but nobody moved (we knew it wasn't a fire and no one was going outside in a blizzard without a coat)...etc. My friends and I got lucky. Megan found our coats and we were out of there by 3:15, started walking (in sandals in the snow!) until we saw a cab and shared it back to our hotel with the girl who had flagged it down. We were warm and safe in our hotel by 3:30.
Some people weren't so lucky... lots of people had coats stolen (mostly people trying to get home alive in the storm after not finding their own, although some opted for tablecloths as makeshift coats), and many were stranded until 6 or 7 am, when police officers and staff of the venue started driving people home.
The venue organized a coat exchange a couple days following the party, but some people still don't have their belongings back, and most people who attended are upset. Class action lawsuit upset. There were apparently lots of other problems that I wasn't aware of at the time (1 hour + waits for a drink, an oxygen bar that was advertised but nowhere to be found, door prize ballots that were non-existent... the list goes on).
Anyways, I'm curious what will happen. Hopefully everyone gets their stuff back!!
Here's a link to a newpaper story about it:
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