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”.