LEMON OIL

HOW CAN ANYONE BE SO CRAZY?

This is how it happened (plot twists only believable in a movie)

A friend told me about an auction held by the U.S. Embassy disposing of USIS (a code name for the CIA) goods....so I turned up, never one to turn down a flea market opportunity. (notice how I used two parallel idioms in the same sentence?)

Then I was hooked. It was a sealed bid auction. Meaning that I had no idea whether a few dollars or a few hundred would win. I used a shotgun approach, put down small ten dollar bids on about 70 or 80 items, many identical.

Well, not exactly ten dollars, more like thirteen dollars and two cents. The thirteen was chosen because most westerners, whether they admit it or not, feel the number to be unlucky, and thus would be more likely to pick ten (the number of fingers) or twelve (the number of apostles).

The two cents was to account both for people who put a zero at the end of their bid without thinking, and two also would win over those who think about it, but put a 'one' at the end of their bid to win out over the others with identical bids.

Well, I was shocked and scared when they told me I'd won 24 bids. That's 24 lots of furniture, that is, sets of furniture.

So, 78 hours later, after furious email and sms texting activity on my part, I rounded up 4 of the 30 new teachers on our staff, most of whom were looking to acquire some furniture.

So I managed, somehow, to share the bounty (they paid the 13 bucks in most cases) and the labor (they definately got the short end of the stick on that account) and 7 weary hours later, we had moved THREE truckloads out of the embassy compound and into our offices and houses and whereever we could stuff them.

In fact, we ended up abandoning two desks, two end tables and a dresser to the dirty acid rain of the day. Sopped and furniture-sated, we finished off the day with kalbi and korean sake.