Categories: It Happened to Me

Hooters: It’s One of the Perks of the Job

The office in which I work is on John Street, a busy side street in the heart of Toronto’s club district. On our side of our block, is a row of brownstones which house several bars, cafes and offices; one of the these brownstons houses the office, and two doors down is the bar where I had the date that helped land me this job. The other side of the street is taken up by the big downtown movieplex, a large but poorly-run branch of Chapters/Indigo, the now-abandoned former location of Playdium, a falafel place and Hooters (“Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined”, as the slogan on their Web site says). The Hooters is half a block down the street, but still visible from our office’s front window.

The weather has been very erratic over the past couple weeks. We’ve had days that have begun with torrential rain in sporadic ten-minute bursts and ended with cloudless sunny skies and vice versa. It’s been driving the restaurateurs on the block crazy, as they don’t know whether to set up their outdoor tables or not. The fine folks at Hooters have a rooftop patio, so they’ve got the same problem. They don’t have tables outdoors on the ground level, but they do have these garage-door walls that they can roll up when the weather is nice.

Last Thursday, the garage doors were rolled up when one of the sudden intense downpours began. The thunder was quite loud and the rain was making so much noise that some of us decided to take a look out the front window. The rain was coming down in buckets, and the unfortunates on the street were scrambling for cover. In the middle of the deluge, the Hooters waitresses ran outside to roll down the garage doors.
It was a scene straight out of Porky’s — they were wearing their standard-issue white tank tops, which were soaked in seconds, all the while, jumping up and down trying to reach the handle on the garage door. One of the garage doors was being stubborn and refused to be pulled down, which ensured that they stood out and jumped in the rain even longer. I always that this kind of thing never happened outside of those contrived scenes in bad teen movies and softcore porn. If you’ve never witnessed this kind of spectacle in real life, I would highly recommend that you drop by the office the next time they have a severe storm warning.

It first happened on Thursday, and another downpour happened on Monday. Monday’s scene was rudely interrupted by a beer truck that stopped in front of Hooters, entirely blocking the view from the offiice. Until then, I’d never even considered that a beer delivery could possibly be a bad thing.

I was so enthralled by the soaking and the jumping and the struggung that I didn’t get the idea until it was too late. As they pulled down the sticky door, it occurred to me to run out, be a good neighbour and help pull that door shut. I know that such gallantry is usually rewarded with a hot threesome in the world of porn flicks, but I figure that I’d at least be rewarded with a free beer and the gratitude of a few Hooters’ waitresses. It think it’d be worth getting soaked for that. I am, after all, a gentleman.