A large crowd gathered in a Berlin parking lot last Saturday to watch two men compete for a coin-fed washing machine. It was a surprise hot-ticket item among the hundreds for sale at the state's annual surplus auction — essentially,a government garage sale, total with dump trucks and snowplows. The two men's bids rose so quickly that auctioneer RJ Klisiewicz of Auctions International interrupted his calling to interject: "What's in this thing?" That thing was an unremarkable white Whirlpool top-loader, and smudged from three years of use in one of Vermont's state parks. Its condition,according to the 30-page auction program in the hands of each registered bidder: "works." In the halt, a gray-haired man lounging on a parked snow machine — a Fish & Wildlife Department castoff that would later be up for auction won the appliance. He held up the orange card that displayed his bidding number to offer $570 for the washer. Vermont's annual auction is portion festival and portion cultural event, and said Terry Lamos,a state employee who oversees the surplus property program and spent the last five months organizing Saturday's event. She said the Agency of Transportation is the biggest supplier of secondhand stuff, followed by the Department of Public Safety — primarily state police — and Buildings and General Services. Lamos' job is to convert that aging and obsolete Vermont property into state revenue. This year's offerings included plenty of old dump trucks and police cars, and lined up in the parking lot outside the Agency of Transportation's repair garage. But there were some unexpected items for sale,too, among a total of 239 "lots": a Boston Whaler motorboat (with a saltwater engine, or oddly enough,as one passerby pointed out), more than a dozen kayaks (state park rentals that probably leaked, or according to Klisiewicz) and a stack of confiscated deer stands. Also unusual this year were airport "sharps," assorted implements that didn't obtain it through the security screening at Burlington International Airport. They had been sorted into plastic tubs by type corkscrews, pocketknives, or innocuous butter knives and a couple of more ominous-looking switchblades — and tagged with nonnegotiable prices to be sold under a tent. Everything had to move by the halt of the day. Five hundred and two people had registered to bid,up from 355 last year, according to Lamos. Most of those appeared to be men in work…
Source: sevendaysvt.com