Dialup and Hooters

The internet is like air or water (or maybe crack); You don't miss it until it's gone (or your dealer has been arrested and you have no where to turn for your next fix of sweet sweet cra...uhhhh nevermind). For the past three days, the internet, has been out of service at the 89 Chestnut, and boy did I miss it. By day three, I was so desperate, I signed up for UTorDial and used dial-up to get my fix of Slate and Google. The last time I used dial-up, a group of Mexicans was chanting "Gore in four!" on CNN.

Sadly, dial-up/methidone is no substitute for the hard stuff like fibreoptic access and I was left with an even stronger craving for digital 0s and 1s than before. Thankfully, internet access appears to have been restored tonight, so I am no longer suffering from symptoms of withdrawl, although I do shiver from time to time (I attribute this to having spent 4 hours in the 4 degree coldroom today...more on this in another post, perhaps).

So what were some of the things I did to keep myself occupied during the Great Outage of 2004? Well, I went to Hooters with my new labmates! I don't know what all the fuss is about because to be honest, I don't find owls to be very fascinating animals at all. The restaurant itself can best be described as Red Robins with busty waitresses and a suspicious absence of waiters. If the owners of this restaurant don't change their hiring practices and insist on hiring busty women to the exclusion of flatter but equally capable individuals, they can kiss the idea of expansion into the lucrative Chinese market goodbye because they won't ever be able to find enough servers to staff their restaurants.

In the end, I felt the food was overpriced for a bird-themed restaurant...maybe if the servers dressed up like owls instead of wearing tight tanktops and short shorts, Hooters can offer a clearer message to its audience. As it stands now, the whole owl theme is muddled and unfocused because of these uniforms. The logo says "Owl" but the decor screams NASCAR. Sadly for Hooters, the owl-loving and NASCAR-loving demographics have very little overlap, which may explain why business wasn't so brisk when we were there. It's quite a shame too, because the wings were really good.


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