A Pyramid Scheme

A Pyramid Scheme - Part 2

To get to this place, I needed to jump on a bus. This wasn't just the biggest auction house in the area, this was one of the biggest in the country, and they'd built it in the country so they'd have enough space. There was a bus route that went past the main entrance – god knows how they pulled that off, seriously there was nothing else for miles around, all it served was the auction hall. But for me, that was pretty good as, despite the nature of the work, I didn't have a ride of my own yet. The isolation of that bus stop is one of the things that bothers me about what happened. But that comes later.

The first week I was pretty much just getting to know the ropes. There was management of course, most visible in our day-to-day lives in the form of the auctioneers, a breed unto themselves, and gods in the world of fine used automobiles. There were others in management of the company I have no doubt, but we never saw them.

Then there was the staff. There were mechanics to look after the cars, drivers to drive the cars, and then there were the Tickers. To understand Tickers, you have to understand how the auction worked. Like I said, it was a huge place. On one side of the auction building itself was the parking lot for the cars to-be-sold. On the other side of the building, the parking lot for cars sold that day. The lot for cards to-be-sold was the size of an airport long term car park, I kid you not. Huge. The sold-cars lot wasn't much smaller, though it usually never got much above 50% capacity that I ever saw. The auction building itself had four “halls” where auctions were going on simultaneously. Most attendees were from second-hand car dealerships, with just the odd average punter who had somehow found out about this font of cheap carriage.

There were four lines of cars leading into each of the four auction halls. There were then two sets of drivers: those who went to get the next cars needed to join the lines, and a second group who drove the head of a line into the hall, and when it was sold, drove it to a designated spot in the sold-cars car park. Make sense so far? Great. The job of the Tickers was to stand at the head of each line of waiting cars, make sure it was the car expected, and when it was time to drive it into the hall, to get a driver into it, and tick it off the list on their clipboards.

All of the Tickers were older ladies who looked identical to the ones who used to serve me lunch at school when I was, like, eight. To the naked eye, all they did was tick clipboards. Yet they wielded an enormous amount of power in our little society. Why? Because they decided who would be driving which car. And there's a big difference between taking a 1988 compact for a spin versus a two year old Mercedes S Class. And oh yes – the auction house had blanket insurance. So I could drive that Mercedes S Class at 20 years old, when in the real world any sane insurance agent would run screaming at the suggestion.

There was technically a hierarchy amongst the drivers, because there were full time employee drivers, and part time agency people like me. But the Tickers could cross driver hierarchy, and no one would complain for fear of driving 7 year old Ford Mondeo's for the rest of eternity.

I spent my first week there observing and figuring all this out. I knew going in I was both agency and newbie, and planned to keep my head down and shut up, because driving anything was better than packing shoes at 7am and realising you still have seven hours to go. There was one other agency guy started the same day as me, Steve, who was quickly re-named Boring Steve by the permanent drivers.

Then there was Sally the Slapper. She was also agency but had been there 2 weeks already. I can't remember her real name for the life of me. She was a big girl, no way to avoid it, she was fat. She insisted on wearing clothes more appropriate for an office, women's power-suits, but they were too small for her. Or maybe it was supposed to be tight-fitting, in defiance of her definite girth. Either way, they pulled in at unfortunate places which just pushed other parts out. Her breasts she intended to push out, and indeed up. She also clearly put a lot of effort into her Big Hair, which was shiny, mahogany, and, well, Big. She also wore a lot of make-up on top of an orangey-brown fake tan. Now, I've seen bad fake tans, all uneven and splotchy like my first attempts at varnishing in woodwork class. I have no idea if there is such a thing as a good fake tan, but at least Sally's was evenly applied.