Naglas

It's good to be Naglas. What is Naglumas? I say it means excessivly active selfishness that may or may not be harmful to others: harmful as in cutting in line; harmless as in what I do. However, it's slang, and in this country the dictionary is too stuck up to define slang words. I've emailed somebody at the language control board to get an official verdict on what the proper word to use is instead, but he hasn't written back yet.

Saturday morning I went to pick up my external hard drive from the computer shop; I'd have to leave it there after serious mechanical failure left it a corpse. They'd told me the warrently was still valid, so I could get a new (blank) one or they could fix it for money. Fix it I said, wtf, I've got tons of information on there! When I went to pick it up, they'd allegedly fixed it and salvaged twenty gigabytes of the data (maybe 20%, but I told them that was 10%). I had agreed to a 200 lit price when I gave it to them, but what the hell, that was for the data, not a small part of the data. They explained that to check 320 gb of hard drive takes the same amount of time regarless of how much can be restored. I don't know anything about it, so what could I do but agree? Then at the last moment I asked if he could at least give me a pedagogue discount--I do keep an expired ITIC card in my wallet. I was going to say a 10% pedagogue discount, but good thing I didn't: he dropped the price by 25%.

Satruday evening I went to meet a couple buddies for a few brewskies, and we ended up going to Memelis. They had karioke going on and I saw somebody of there getting beers. I wasn't exactly sure what the deal was, because the singing was so bad that I spent at least haldf the fime we were there outside smoking my pipe jto get away from it. When one buddy signed us up for Yellow Submarine I asked if we'd get free beer.

"Will we get free beers?"
"No."
"I demand free beers!"
"I can't get you free beers unless I buy them for you myself."
"Perfect, so you'll buy us some beers if we sing?"
"Well no!"
"Well there's no way I'm singing then."

We were already on the list though and my friend didn't like the idea of getting on stage and not singing until we got some free beer, so I agreed to sing. In the middle of the song when there's no singing for a moment I yelled into the mic "We want free beer!" And then when the song was over I yelled "We're still waiting for free beer!" Well, I, the guy who was yelling for what he wanted all the time, ended up getting a free beer; my friend who just wanted to sing got nothing. Then he signed us up to sing New York, New York.* Who sings such a slow song at a bar? We sucked. It was way better when the next guys did Knockin on Heavan's Door.

*There was so little audience participation during the song that at the end of it I yelled "Klaipeda!" Apparently, naming the city you're in on stage does not always get you any applause.