I think there needs to be a law that anyone calling themselves an auctioneer ought to at least be able to talk fast.

An oral surgeon I know in another county “sells” a local charity auction once a year, then has the nerve to call himself an auctioneer, despite the fact he doesn’t have a chant and can’t count. He even had business cards printed to proclaim his auctioneering prowess.

It’s just not right. Auctioneers can’t go around calling themselves dentists, now can they?

“Dr. Big Mouth” (who has a oral opening so large he can eat bananas sideways)  has what I call multiple career disorder: He’s a dentist, but desperately wants to be an auctioneer. And a singer. Anything that puts him onstage and in front of a crowd.

For years, he has volunteered at the local elementary schools to play his guitar and sing for the little tykes, despite the fact he has a voice that makes your flesh crawl. The poor kids who somehow don’t get the warning that he’s coming to their school so they can play hooky are said to have traumatic nightmares about the experience well into their young adult years.

One of the biggest stages in any area is the county fair, and Dr. Big Mouth always hangs around the Junior Livestock Auction in hopes that the auctioneer might not show up, or lose his voice, and then he’d be called upon to perform at the Big Show. Dr. Big Mouth always has a supply of business cards handy and keeps his voice warmed up just in case. This is one show in which he definitely wants to star.

Dr. Big Mouth’s county is fortunate to have an outstanding roster of livestock auctioneers to sell the kids’ project animals, including – at times – more than one World Champion Livestock Auctioneer. One would think Dr. Big Mouth would realize that up against these guys he’d be totally humiliated, but vanity is not subject to reason.

As luck would have it, one year everything conspired to give Dr. Big Mouth the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he’d been dreaming about for years. You see, in addition to being great bid callers, most of the regular auctioneers at the fair are also team ropers.
Through some scheduling error it just so happened the two auctioneers scheduled to sell the lower-placed hogs that morning were also up in the Century Roping.

In their haste to get to the arena on time, the auctioneers/ropers looked around for a replacement and saw Dr. Big Mouth begging like a lap poodle.

As the real auctioneers left for the roping arena, Dr. Big Mouth sat down behind the microphone and gave a rousing 10-minute speech about the 186th-placing hog, and then began to sell in slow motion. “O-n-e-d-o-l-l-a-r ... o-n-e-d-o-l-l-a-r.”

His so-called auctioneering was first greeted with an outburst of silence, followed by prolonged booing.

The young girl in the sales ring with her hog saw her whole life flash in front of her and realized that thanks to Dr. Big Mouth, she’d live in hopeless poverty for the rest of her life. FFA advisors, 4-H parents and kids who were waiting in line to sell panicked.
Thinking fast, the clerk pulled the cord on the amplifier and announced they were experiencing sound problems. Miraculously, these technical difficulties were fixed when the real auctioneers returned from throwing their ropes at the ground.

It gets worse. I don’t know if it was the result of luck or payola, but a photographer from the county newspaper just happened to take a picture of Dr. Big Mouth on the auction block and ran it on the front page, referring to him as the auctioneer for the county fair.
This, despite the fact he hadn’t completely sold a single animal.
As a result of the publicity, he’s singing and selling quite regularly now, absenteeism in area schools is sky-high and schoolchildren live in constant fear. The dentist they not-so-jokingly refer to as “Dr. Death” now has three ways to hurt them: He can sing to them, auction their fair animal and pull their teeth.