Let me paint a little picture for you.

You're young and free. It's your first, maybe second or even third, time being able to buy alcohol legally in a country only four hours from home. You are excited for what the weekend has in store for you and your friends.

When you go out, you slip on a crop top, skinny jeans, and a teddy coat — because that teddy coat will keep you warm when hopping from bar to bar.

Before you even head to the bars with your friends, you drink a little. Not too much where you are sloppy, but enough to have you dancing to any kind of music without a care in the world. You're with your friends — and life is just great.

You finally go out feeling great and on a good level of no-care-in-the-world as well as I-can-care-if-I-need-to. You hop from bar to bar and get a couple more drinks in you when you finally arrive at what was supposed to be a fun bar named Garfinkel's.

After waiting in a claustrophobic line for almost forty minutes, you finally are pushed inside by the swarms of people behind you. Still feeling good, you are ushered down the stairs into the heated basement.

"YOU HAVE TO CHECK YOUR COATS" They yell at you before you can go in to enjoy the rest of your night. When you say you don't want to, they immediately tell you, "It's required. Everyone must check their coats." So you do as your told because you don't want to cause a scene, even though you would have rather not tipped strangers $5 for holding the coat you'd rather be wearing.

The night is fun, but stuffy. Your friends trickle out of the bar until it's just you and almost a hundred strangers crammed into the little space there is. But you don't care because you got some guy and an old friend to buy you a couple more shots, so you're still feeling great.

It's finally time to go when you realize none of your friends are in sight. So you head to the coat check and stand in line for twenty minutes. All of a sudden a girl stomps out of the bar as you're only a few feet from the front of the line. "I didn't lose my ticket!" She screams at the coat check ladies over the booming music.

Not wanting to be like her, you check your pockets to make sure you have the ticket they gave you.

Your heart sinks.

But you know what was in the pockets. A little plastic giraffe you had saved from your bellini earlier in the day in the left pocket and your drink tickets and $20 dollars in the right. You can describe that jacket like the back of your hand, because it's your new and most prized jacket right now.

You finally get to the counter and try to explain to the coat check ladies your jacket. "If you don't have your ticket, no coat."

Okay, fair. They have a long line... They're stressed... You get it.

But you're alone in a bar and are about to walk home a little too drunk in freezing temperatures. So you ask the guy who's helping everyone stay in line if he can help you get your jacket. He works here - he'll help.

"No, no ticket — no jacket."

Tears start forming in your eyes. You know everything about the coat.

He sees you start to cry and asks if you have a picture of you wearing it. You quickly show him the picture you had taken only a few hours prior. He looks behind the counter and shakes his head, "Maybe try coming back in the morning."

The feeling good leaves you too quickly and the tears stream down your cheeks. You've forgotten how to get home. You've forgotten everything else. You want your jacket. The jacket you had spent money on. The jacket you had bought because it was just so cute. It was yours.

Give it back.

You persist just a little bit. You hate those kinds of people in customer service. The kind that won't let go when the company obviously has policies in place that make their employees do stuff they might not want to do. It seems reasonable to require a ticket. But you have all the information they need to give you your jacket. How else would you know the exact content of the pockets?

The guy who was "helping you" gives you his phone number to call him in the morning.

You thank him and leave — only to realize it was a ploy to get you to leave the bar.

Now you're in the freezing cold with just a crop top and jeans. Your phone's at 2% and you forget where you live.

Some nice Australians see you freezing near a bridge trying to call your friends when they finally help and get through to them. You wait for almost half an hour before your friends come and keep you warm as you walk home.

You're okay.

Garfinkel's — while they have certain policies that I'm sure protect them from being sued — was completely disrespectful and rude after that weekend. After calling at all times of the day — but especially during their business hours (which they so rudely kept insisting was my problem was that I was calling when they weren't open) — the manager finally responded to one of my emails after I called them out on Instagram.

Look, I'm not proud of how low I dropped to call someone out on Instagram, but they took $60 worth of my possessions that night. I was pissed.

And even when responding to my emails, the manager practically said the same thing at the bar. "If you lose your ticket, you lose your jacket." Even after forcing me to check my coat.

Maybe you don't have to completely avoid Whistler for MLK weekend next year, but I am not the only girl this happened to that night at Garfinkel's.

So if you do decide to go to Whistler, just avoid Garfinkel's if you want to keep your belongings.