On Saturday, October 1, 2016, three of my teammates and I became victims of the jacket-stealing epidemic. For those of you aren’t aware, there’s something about the Colgate air that turns a select number of those among us into rampant jacket thieves, and innocent people have their jackets stolen, rarely to be seen again. It all starts with one person. That one person, likely in a stupor, cannot manage to find their jacket and out of impatience and desperation grabs the nearest jacket they can find, content to wear it out into the night. From there, the owner of that jacket is now jacket-less and has to grab somebody else’s in order not to freeze. The chain continues and the next morning a wave of people take to Facebook groups in search of their stolen jackets.
There was something different about our jackets being stolen. It wasn’t a particularly cold night, so we only wore our jackets to protect us from the impending rain. Without the cold weather to cause desperation, we didn’t surmise that anyone would be in jacket-stealing mode, but just in case we used our tried and true method of tying our four jackets together to deter a thief and hiding them outside the building under a bush. Can you imagine our horror when we returned to that bush after celebrating my friend’s birthday for an hour or so and our jackets were nowhere to be found? That horror turned into anger. Yes, we now had to get rained on despite our valiant efforts to be prepared, but most of our anger was centered on the thieves themselves. Our jackets weren’t in a communal space so nobody just got mixed up or frustrated trying to find theirs and took ours. They were tied together so the thief consciously knew he was doing that which we so desperately were trying to avoid. Lastly, due to the weather conditions, it isn’t too far of a stretch to guess that our jackets were swiped by unprepared people caught in the rain who weren’t even resorting to taking our jackets because they couldn’t find theirs but actually because they didn’t bring theirs.
Our jackets survived all freshman year and always came home with us, and it’s a shame that so early in our sophomore year they’ve been snatched from our grasp. At this moment, I’d like to mourn the loss of these four jackets.
Hannah’s jacket was a North Face rain jacket in a stunning purple color. Most tragically, her lip gloss was in the pocket and since “[her] lip gloss is poppin’, [her] lip gloss is cool”, Hannah is now in a constant plight of being unsure if she can be poppin’ and cool anymore without it.
Marina’s jacket wasn’t even a jacket. It was a black Riverdale High School track sweatshirt with her last name on the back. I’m not sure how dumb one must be to take a sweatshirt with somebody else’s name on it, but alas, unless Brigid, James, Katherine, Jessica, or Kyle (the only other people at Colgate with the last name Reilly) took this sweatshirt, then the sweatshirt has been rendered utterly useless.
Skyler’s jacket was a white Koppen rain jacket that never intended to be copped. This jacket is iconic and was even the star of a picture photoshopped for Skyler’s birthday (creds to Emma Palmer)- which just happened to be the same night our jackets were stolen. That memory is now forever tainted by the sudden disappearance of this jacket from any future memories.
My jacket was a navy blue Adidas windbreaker from approximately the 80s with a broken zipper that’s incredibly annoying to zip up. I can only hope its new owner is as annoyed by that zipper as I was, but I lament my inability to take on a night on the town looking retro. And warm. And dry.
We now ask that the reader would please pause and observe a moment of silence for our four beloved jackets, as we reflect upon their ascension to the great coat closet in the sky (at least as far as the four of us are concerned).
Thank you.
To get real for a minute, this whole epidemic that leaves so many people unhappy and with a degraded faith in humanity could be avoided if everyone just brought their own jacket out and wore their own jacket home. I really don’t think it is or should be that hard. And at the very least, people could find a way to return the jacket they stole. We’re Colgate. We’re better than that.
