School Auction

We had our school’s annual auction tonight.   It was the sixth auction my husband and I've attended for the school.   I remember the first year we went; we didn’t know the people or the school well as the auction was early in the school year.  One husband and wife and I remember the wife raising her husband’s arm that held their paddle again and again for auction item after auction item.    We didn’t bid on much that year.

This year I was the emcee for the event.   I’d tell you I was more than a little anxious about the job, but I really wasn’t.   Speaking in front of large groups of people has never bothered me.   That, and I knew the audience well.   I was fairly sure I could do a decent job, mostly because we had a professional auctioneer doing the auctioning part itself.

We had some phone calls with the auctioneer and as we discussed things, my job got smaller and smaller.   I was only going to speak at a few key points.    That changed somewhat when we got there tonight.

We met the auctioneer for the first time about an hour before the live auction started.   I was about as busy as a bride at her wedding with people asking me things on top of the responsibilities I was working on in preparation of the start of the auction proper.

The auctioneer did an outstanding job of raising money for the school.   Hopefully we can bring her back next year.   But she threw an unexpected thing at me just before we got started.   She told me to introduce the twenty-two items and she’d bid them up.    Okay, not a problem.   Only I hadn’t prepared to introduce them.

I tried to get some time alone to read over the descriptions so I could plan what to say (because reading off a sheet is a less than ideal energy building speaking strategy.    For the majority of the auction I was barely keeping one item ahead of her.   I had a fast learning curve to go through, figuring out how to work with the auctioneer to best help her while moving quickly enough to keep the audience engaged.

The thing I like most about the auctioneer was her friendly attitude and her willingness to work with whatever we had and basically roll with the situation, no matter what was happening.   Nothing flustered her.    I was on the verge of being unready when she handed the mic back to me for the majority of the night.

But I had five years of experience at our school’s auctions and a lot of personal experience with the auction items themselves as some were repeats or similar to prior year’s items.   The auction went well.   It raised significantly more money than we anticipated it would and we added an additional amount of money to the Capital Campaign final phase, which is closing out at the end of the school year.

Would I do it again?  Yes.   Especially now that I know how to best support the auctioneer.   All the members of the committee learned a lot from the experience (we do every year).   This year we may have raised more money than we ever have before—something we typically do every year.

The auction committee worked very hard to make tonight a success.   And a success it was.   I was on the outskirts of the committee, not being very involved personally, but glad to play a part in the success of the night.

The Big Boy Update:  My niece, Olivia, is staying with us this weekend as she has a swim meet in town.   Yesterday she was disqualified from an event for jumping the start before the horn.   She’s as close to a professional at swimming as you can rightly be at seventeen and this rarely happens, but sometimes it does.   My son, not knowing much about tact, asked Olivia when he saw her, “why’d you get disqualified?”   Fortunately, Olivia said she’d slept off the disqualification and kindly explained to my son what had happened and what it meant.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was unhappy with her headphones this morning.   She chucked them on the ground and they rolled under the bed.   She went off to the bathroom a minute or two later.   When she came out of the bathroom she wanted to know where her headphones were because she couldn’t find them.    These are large, over the head, covering the ears type of headphones and she would normally be able to see them had they not been out of sight under the bed.    She said, “did I drop them in the toilet?”   I told her I was certain she would have heard the large headphones splash in the toilet had she done that and that maybe a bit more searching would help her find them.