The danger of auctions
So, as a matter of the public interest, I figured I should let it be known that auctions, when not treated with respect and care, can be dangerous things. My family has a history with auctions, and it's worth documenting, so
ACT I
When I was a mere tyke, about two years old, My parents thought it would be fun to go see what an auction was actually like, so we went. Dad put me up on his shoulders - my favorite perch - and we wandered about looking at the items for sale. When it came time for the bidding, we stood in the back and watched as items were auctioned off.
One of the auctions was a lot of television sets, and the bidding was particularly fierce over those TVs. Some one up at the front really wanted them, but every time they would bid, someone in the back would raise them. This continued until the person at the front just wasn't willing to go any higher.
After the bidding was over, one of the auction-house staff came up to my father and asked him how he would like to pay for his new televisions. But my father hadn't bid on the televisions, and explained this to the auction-houser, who insisted that my father had won those television sets.
The confusion was soon resolved when someone, I'm not sure who, noticed that there was a two-year-old perched upon my father's shoulders who was raising his hands repeatedly in order to get the nice man who was talking fast to point at him. I had won those television sets.
We were, of course, asked to leave the auction house.
ACT II
A couple of years later, while they were both students at UTC, my parents decided to try going to an auction again. This time, they were smart and left me behind, knowing that I would mischievously bring ruin upon our house by bidding on something we definitely could not afford on their meager student budget.
Of course, I'm apparently not the only one in the family with happy hands. One of the first items up for bid was a brown Dodge pickup truck. The bidding started at $2000, which was obviously much less than the truck was actually worth, so my Dad decided that he would have some fun and open the bidding, knowing that someone else was bound to bid more than $2000.
It seems that nobody else thought that the truck was worth that much. About one minute later, bidding was closed, and he was obligated to buy that truck. There was only one problem. He didn't have $2000. At the time, he and my mother were both college students and the parents of two small children, and we lived with my grandparents because we couldn't afford to live anywhere else.
Fortunately, my Grandpa, whose virtues I cannot begin to enumerate (although I will note that he was the kindest, sanest, most patient man I have ever met and if I can only be a tenth as cool as he was I can count my life a success), was able to get a loan and buy the truck. This turned out to be a good thing, as my grandparents' other car was an AMC Pacer that had a bit of a personality. My Grandpa drove that truck for years. Even though it wasn't a pretty truck, it was a darn sight prettier than the Pacer.
ACT III
When I was in the University Honors program at UTC, we would have charity date auctions yearly where those of us who were brave enough would get up on a catwalk and dance around until someone promised to give money just to get us off of the stage. The money would go to a different worthy cause every year, like the Chattanooga Community Kitchen and Chattanooga Room in the Inn.
We started my first year, and by my third, a friend of mine who was nervous asked me to make sure that no creeps won the bidding on her. I complied, and so when she was up on the catwalk, right on cue, a very disheveled, fifty-ish man started bidding on her. I, of course, did my duty and raised my bid until I won the auction at around $80.
Of course, during the course of the bidding, other people began to realize that one of the people involved in our little bidding war looked like a serial killer (and no, it wasn't me - I didn't perfect my "serial killer" look until a few years later) and they got to talking. A minute after I won the bid, one of my friends on the Honor's Council asked me if I would make sure he didn't win any auctions, as something was obviously amiss.
Over the next few minutes, creepy-older-guy bid on two more young ladies who I had to bail out, but fortunately the auctioneers were wise by this point and rushed things so that bidding ended at around $30 for both auctions. By that point, I was around $150 in the hole. I had promises from friends to supplement me, and from the Honor's council to forgive any excess debt accrued in protecting young ladies from the crazy scary man, but I figured that I would approach the dilemma in a more direct manner and actually speak to him during the intermission.
Of course, it became apparent after a few sentences that this man just wasn't quite right in the head. He was very nice, and seemed intelligent enough, but something was off with his speech pattern. I let him know that he had people worried, partially because nobody knew who he was, and asked him not to bid anymore as he was making the auctionees nervous. He agreed, apologized for making us uncomfortable, and asked if he could still donate money to the Community Kitchen. That made me feel like an utter heel, as this man was being very nice, and I'd asked him not to play in our game, and here he was asking if he could donate to our charity. Given the situation, I still don't think I did anything other than the way it should have been done, but I still felt bad about it, and at the end of the auction I wound up shelling out all of my available money for three dates that I never actually went on. That was the last year I participated in the date auction.
I have actually gotten to know this man (who I will not name here) more since then, and discovered that he's been on lithium for over 20 years, as prescribed by his psychiatrist father. Maybe I've seen One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest one too many times, but I honestly believe that he's been overmedicated, and that at this point, any psychological problems he may have are probably indistinguishable from the effects of having been on lithium for 20 years. Regardless, he has no understanding of what is considered appropriate social behavior, and it has gotten him into trouble several times in the past. The worst thing is that I'm pretty sure that there's a brilliant mind in there, because I've seen glimmers of it here and there, but it's fettered quite thoroughly by the lithium. It's one of those sad situations I really don't like to dwell on because it hurts to even think about it.
ACT IV
So last December, the city had an auction, and I knew that the library was getting rid of some old PC's that I figured I could turn into glorified word processors and probably sell to college students for about $25 a pop. I figured that I would give it a shot, and for larks, I invited my brothers to come along. At the time, I wasn't thinking about our history with auctions - I just thought they might enjoy it.
The auction was in the police training center parking lot, and when we got there, it was bitter, bitter cold. There was a small crowd milling about looking at the bits and pieces to be auctioned off. There was lots of junk in the way of ancient computers, monitors, and printers - all of which had passed their expiration dates ten years ago. There were stereos, watches, satellite dishes - one of the auction items was a gold tooth, which I thought was particularly creepy. We got a list that told which items were in which lot, and looked at what was there, noting the lot numbers of what we wanted.
When the auction started, they noted that it was cash only, and you had to pay immediately. Not having cash, we schlepped on over to the Golden Gallon to get some green at the ATM, which took about ten minutes. When we got back, the auction was in progress, and we noticed that they were selling groups of lots, instead of individual lots, which meant that if I was going to buy my computers, I was going to have to take the junk monitors with them, and anything else that the auctioneers decided to lump in with them. It wouldn't be pleasant, but I figured it would be worth it.
Anyway, one series of lots came up, and one of the lots included a bunch of CB radios. Bugs, one of my brothers, decided he might want those CB radios, so he opened the bidding at $5. Now, the first hint he should have had was that the auctioneer had been going for a minute or so just trying to get somebody to bid on this stuff. The second clue was that nobody tried to outbid him. He won with a $5 bid.
So we went out to see what exactly he had won, and it turned out to have been all the junk electronics. There were CB radios, but there were also monitors, printers, 386 systems, 8088 systems, DEC terminals, antennae, and what seems to be an entire subset of the 911 communications system, almost all of which are not only useless, but chock full of heavy metals and toxins that are fine in a bit of electronic equipment, but are absolutely not the sort of things you can just toss into the dump as they might leach into the groundwater and cause babies to be born with more heads than they're supposed to start out with 1.
All told, there were about eight truckloads of junk that we had to haul off of that lot, and they never did sell those computers. They claimed they did, and I asked around to find out who had bought them, but nobody claimed them, and they sat out in that parking lot for a month. The computers probably got tossed in the dump, and the junk my brother bought wound up under his house and in my garage taking up space.
Fortunately, Office Depot and HP announced that they will be accepting one electronic device per person per day from July 18 to Sept. 6 for recycling. For this, I have to give praise to these two companies, but I also fully intend to assist my brother in taking full advantage of this offer. They may come to regret this if it's a publicity stunt and not an altruistic attempt at saving the environment 2. It seems regrettable to me, though, that we produce all of this stuff, but we don't provide any decent means of recycling or reusing them after their usefulness has expired.
EPILOGUE
So, anyway, I'm sure it's plain to see now why auctions can be dangerous things, especially for my family. The greatest danger is that you will actually win what you are bidding on. That is not to say that no good can come out of auctions, but one should definitely be wary, as the consequences of unsafe auctioning can be disastrous.
1 - Not that I mind people having more than one head, but I figure they should work to get a head just like everyone else.
2 - Although my paranoid "reptilian brain" says that they may be trying to mitigate their own liability when it comes out that these things are VERY BAD when they get into the groundwater. It's sort of like the cigarette manufacturer thing we're seeing nowadays, only with toxins instead of nicotine.
ACT I
When I was a mere tyke, about two years old, My parents thought it would be fun to go see what an auction was actually like, so we went. Dad put me up on his shoulders - my favorite perch - and we wandered about looking at the items for sale. When it came time for the bidding, we stood in the back and watched as items were auctioned off.
One of the auctions was a lot of television sets, and the bidding was particularly fierce over those TVs. Some one up at the front really wanted them, but every time they would bid, someone in the back would raise them. This continued until the person at the front just wasn't willing to go any higher.
After the bidding was over, one of the auction-house staff came up to my father and asked him how he would like to pay for his new televisions. But my father hadn't bid on the televisions, and explained this to the auction-houser, who insisted that my father had won those television sets.
The confusion was soon resolved when someone, I'm not sure who, noticed that there was a two-year-old perched upon my father's shoulders who was raising his hands repeatedly in order to get the nice man who was talking fast to point at him. I had won those television sets.
We were, of course, asked to leave the auction house.
ACT II
A couple of years later, while they were both students at UTC, my parents decided to try going to an auction again. This time, they were smart and left me behind, knowing that I would mischievously bring ruin upon our house by bidding on something we definitely could not afford on their meager student budget.
Of course, I'm apparently not the only one in the family with happy hands. One of the first items up for bid was a brown Dodge pickup truck. The bidding started at $2000, which was obviously much less than the truck was actually worth, so my Dad decided that he would have some fun and open the bidding, knowing that someone else was bound to bid more than $2000.
It seems that nobody else thought that the truck was worth that much. About one minute later, bidding was closed, and he was obligated to buy that truck. There was only one problem. He didn't have $2000. At the time, he and my mother were both college students and the parents of two small children, and we lived with my grandparents because we couldn't afford to live anywhere else.
Fortunately, my Grandpa, whose virtues I cannot begin to enumerate (although I will note that he was the kindest, sanest, most patient man I have ever met and if I can only be a tenth as cool as he was I can count my life a success), was able to get a loan and buy the truck. This turned out to be a good thing, as my grandparents' other car was an AMC Pacer that had a bit of a personality. My Grandpa drove that truck for years. Even though it wasn't a pretty truck, it was a darn sight prettier than the Pacer.
ACT III
When I was in the University Honors program at UTC, we would have charity date auctions yearly where those of us who were brave enough would get up on a catwalk and dance around until someone promised to give money just to get us off of the stage. The money would go to a different worthy cause every year, like the Chattanooga Community Kitchen and Chattanooga Room in the Inn.
We started my first year, and by my third, a friend of mine who was nervous asked me to make sure that no creeps won the bidding on her. I complied, and so when she was up on the catwalk, right on cue, a very disheveled, fifty-ish man started bidding on her. I, of course, did my duty and raised my bid until I won the auction at around $80.
Of course, during the course of the bidding, other people began to realize that one of the people involved in our little bidding war looked like a serial killer (and no, it wasn't me - I didn't perfect my "serial killer" look until a few years later) and they got to talking. A minute after I won the bid, one of my friends on the Honor's Council asked me if I would make sure he didn't win any auctions, as something was obviously amiss.
Over the next few minutes, creepy-older-guy bid on two more young ladies who I had to bail out, but fortunately the auctioneers were wise by this point and rushed things so that bidding ended at around $30 for both auctions. By that point, I was around $150 in the hole. I had promises from friends to supplement me, and from the Honor's council to forgive any excess debt accrued in protecting young ladies from the crazy scary man, but I figured that I would approach the dilemma in a more direct manner and actually speak to him during the intermission.
Of course, it became apparent after a few sentences that this man just wasn't quite right in the head. He was very nice, and seemed intelligent enough, but something was off with his speech pattern. I let him know that he had people worried, partially because nobody knew who he was, and asked him not to bid anymore as he was making the auctionees nervous. He agreed, apologized for making us uncomfortable, and asked if he could still donate money to the Community Kitchen. That made me feel like an utter heel, as this man was being very nice, and I'd asked him not to play in our game, and here he was asking if he could donate to our charity. Given the situation, I still don't think I did anything other than the way it should have been done, but I still felt bad about it, and at the end of the auction I wound up shelling out all of my available money for three dates that I never actually went on. That was the last year I participated in the date auction.
I have actually gotten to know this man (who I will not name here) more since then, and discovered that he's been on lithium for over 20 years, as prescribed by his psychiatrist father. Maybe I've seen One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest one too many times, but I honestly believe that he's been overmedicated, and that at this point, any psychological problems he may have are probably indistinguishable from the effects of having been on lithium for 20 years. Regardless, he has no understanding of what is considered appropriate social behavior, and it has gotten him into trouble several times in the past. The worst thing is that I'm pretty sure that there's a brilliant mind in there, because I've seen glimmers of it here and there, but it's fettered quite thoroughly by the lithium. It's one of those sad situations I really don't like to dwell on because it hurts to even think about it.
ACT IV
So last December, the city had an auction, and I knew that the library was getting rid of some old PC's that I figured I could turn into glorified word processors and probably sell to college students for about $25 a pop. I figured that I would give it a shot, and for larks, I invited my brothers to come along. At the time, I wasn't thinking about our history with auctions - I just thought they might enjoy it.
The auction was in the police training center parking lot, and when we got there, it was bitter, bitter cold. There was a small crowd milling about looking at the bits and pieces to be auctioned off. There was lots of junk in the way of ancient computers, monitors, and printers - all of which had passed their expiration dates ten years ago. There were stereos, watches, satellite dishes - one of the auction items was a gold tooth, which I thought was particularly creepy. We got a list that told which items were in which lot, and looked at what was there, noting the lot numbers of what we wanted.
When the auction started, they noted that it was cash only, and you had to pay immediately. Not having cash, we schlepped on over to the Golden Gallon to get some green at the ATM, which took about ten minutes. When we got back, the auction was in progress, and we noticed that they were selling groups of lots, instead of individual lots, which meant that if I was going to buy my computers, I was going to have to take the junk monitors with them, and anything else that the auctioneers decided to lump in with them. It wouldn't be pleasant, but I figured it would be worth it.
Anyway, one series of lots came up, and one of the lots included a bunch of CB radios. Bugs, one of my brothers, decided he might want those CB radios, so he opened the bidding at $5. Now, the first hint he should have had was that the auctioneer had been going for a minute or so just trying to get somebody to bid on this stuff. The second clue was that nobody tried to outbid him. He won with a $5 bid.
So we went out to see what exactly he had won, and it turned out to have been all the junk electronics. There were CB radios, but there were also monitors, printers, 386 systems, 8088 systems, DEC terminals, antennae, and what seems to be an entire subset of the 911 communications system, almost all of which are not only useless, but chock full of heavy metals and toxins that are fine in a bit of electronic equipment, but are absolutely not the sort of things you can just toss into the dump as they might leach into the groundwater and cause babies to be born with more heads than they're supposed to start out with 1.
All told, there were about eight truckloads of junk that we had to haul off of that lot, and they never did sell those computers. They claimed they did, and I asked around to find out who had bought them, but nobody claimed them, and they sat out in that parking lot for a month. The computers probably got tossed in the dump, and the junk my brother bought wound up under his house and in my garage taking up space.
Fortunately, Office Depot and HP announced that they will be accepting one electronic device per person per day from July 18 to Sept. 6 for recycling. For this, I have to give praise to these two companies, but I also fully intend to assist my brother in taking full advantage of this offer. They may come to regret this if it's a publicity stunt and not an altruistic attempt at saving the environment 2. It seems regrettable to me, though, that we produce all of this stuff, but we don't provide any decent means of recycling or reusing them after their usefulness has expired.
EPILOGUE
So, anyway, I'm sure it's plain to see now why auctions can be dangerous things, especially for my family. The greatest danger is that you will actually win what you are bidding on. That is not to say that no good can come out of auctions, but one should definitely be wary, as the consequences of unsafe auctioning can be disastrous.
1 - Not that I mind people having more than one head, but I figure they should work to get a head just like everyone else.
2 - Although my paranoid "reptilian brain" says that they may be trying to mitigate their own liability when it comes out that these things are VERY BAD when they get into the groundwater. It's sort of like the cigarette manufacturer thing we're seeing nowadays, only with toxins instead of nicotine.