I was asked to come to a fundraiser event to run an auction whose auctioneer was unavailable.  I don’t drink so I didn’t feel bad not paying to be there and spent about an hour taking notes in the item, coming up with mediocre jokes, and determining minimum bids and bid increments.  The auction was about to start when the formerly unavailable auctioneer arrived and took the reigns, I was told he was ‘very good’ so I just noted bids.

Once the auction started I was underwhelmed by his performance as he read off of boxes, mispronounced words and made cheap auction jokes but then I found out why he was “good”.  During the auctioning of a wine party the bidding was slow so he doubled the offering, when that didn’t do the trick he increased it again by fifty percent and then offered to match the offer for anyone who matched the bid.  So “good auctioneer” apparently means “able to arbitrarily increase the offerings”.

Every OA auction I do comes with a standard boat of personal terrors as, while I do research on each item with the assistance of some long-memoried fellows I still have a largely extemporaneous style that can theoretically get me into trouble.  I’m terrified of a Freudian slip or two words coming too close together and forming an ethnic slur and a dedicated team of braincells scan for such things.  A second set of fears is picking a bad minimum bid. $3 is cheap, $5 is normal, $8 is special, $20 is expensive/established price and I refuse to reduce the starting price once announced.  If I miss, I miss.

Bids were sluggish so I moved to a popular item, a grab mug.  I raised it stating the opening bid at $5.   Only one person bid and it sold for $5.  Historically, this means nothing as grab mugs were once sold at a fixed price of $3 consisting of a $1 mug and two or three $0.50 to $1.00 patches, but I’m somewhat proud of getting $12-$18 for these so $5 represented a crisis of confidence.  I was a bit shaken but moved on eventually returning to another mug.  This time, I did exactly what I did last time but mentioned that the mug was rare in that it had a blue fleur-de-lis but was a Boy Scout mug.  Hands shot up and I was redeemed.