Do I hear $5.02?

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat

The fine men and women at the Surplus Property Office are responsible for hawking all the stuff the university no longer wants. This is done via a silent auction, which is essentially a monetary guessing game. Upon finding the relic that your little heart desires, you jot down what you're willing to fork over for it. The highest bidding Joe Q. Citizen happily takes home the goodies, and the university has a few more dollars to waste on subterranean silliness. The only rules are that the minimum bid is five bucks, and the winners not only have to pay for, but also pick up their bounty within a week of the auction, lest they be blacklisted from future auctions.

So a friend and I decided to head down to the warehouse district, in hopes of scoring a bargain. Upon first walking into the warehouse, our eyes were greeted by endless rows of surplus goods. You could almost hear the announcer proclaiming, "Look at these luxurious prizes...fabulous merchandise just waiting to be won today on Wheeeeeeeeel of Surplus!" Desks and chairs. Filing cabinets. Electronics galore. Old card catalog cabinets. Ancient computers dating back to the Reagan administration. First term, that is. And of course, what surplus auction would be complete without a robotic dummy designed to simulate cardiopulmonary anomalies for medical school students?

There are two kinds of players in this game: the amateurs and the old pros. We, being the amateurs, found incredible humor in the gargantuan old electronics and lab equipment predating our births, as well as a med school mannequin. The veterans, essentially scraggly-haired men in their fifties, seemed unfazed, perhaps because such items were contemporary with their youth. While we were busy being rowdy kids, they were preoccupied with examining the guts of electronics to see if the resistors and capacitors were up to par with the technology of yesteryear. One can only wonder what exactly they were building in their garages with all these old parts. Perhaps ignorance is bliss.

Excited by the possibility of dirt cheap goodies, we got down to business. My friend was after a desk and a few chairs, and I Hoped to score a VCR or maybe an old fax machine. We poked around the warehouse, parts of which felt like a NASA wind tunnel, and each picked out a few things. We appraised each item, bidding in hopes of paying the least amount possible for the wares. Unfortunately, lowball bids tend not to win auctions.

A few days later, I received a notice in the mail saying I had successfully bid five dollars and one cent on... drum role please... a microfiche machine. Why in the hell would I bid on a microfiche machine? After much pondering, we recalled that two old VCRs were in the same lot (auctionspeak for items grouped together because they presumably have something in common beyond their prehistoric origin) as the microfiche. Eureka.

However, we being amateurs, made a teensy rookie error: we didn't closely examine what the lot consisted of besides the VCRs. You see, Lot B-12 contained not only two VCRs and a microfiche machine, but also a microfilm machine. Unfortunately, there was nothing "micro" about it. Unbeknownst to us, I had purchased, for the great sum of $5.01, a gargantuan machine, presumably used to project images from a roll of film onto a large screen. Or at least that's what we gathered from its rows of mysterious switches and levers. Why exactly it was the size of an old Pac-Man arcade game, was beyond us. But who can argue with 1960's technology that brought us such greats as the Corvair and eight track tapes? However, I politely explained to the guy working there that not only would fit into my little Mustang, but it probably outweighed it by a couple orders of magnitude. Luckily, we were pardoned from taking the behemoth with us, so we grabbed the VCRs and microfiche machine and scurried off before he changed his mind and blacklisted us forever.

As it turns out, the VRCs are useless, at least for awhile, since my roommates for the summer don't have a television, and I have no clue what to do with an old microfiche machine (suggestions are welcome). But, hey, a killer deal is a killer deal. So, if you've got nothing to do one lazy afternoon, head down and see if you can't score a bargain. Besides, they're finally remodeling the Economics building, so a whole trove of ancient artifacts awaits you.

Ryan Chirnomas is a molecular and cellular biology junior. When he finished this column, he skipped off into the setting sun whistling the "Let's Make Deal" theme.