The last year that I was in the Army I was stationed at FT Stewart, GA. The four of us lived in an old double wide trailer that was in need of repair. Luckily the landlord would let me fix things and then take the cost out of the rent.

The place had an automatic dishwasher that did not work. My wife at that time (now X) really wanted a working dishwasher. I kept asking around about where I could find one cheap. I was told to check on the military surplus auction.

I did just that and found that there was an auction that friday and they had a dishwasher on their list of items. I immediately made arrangements to take that friday off. Had no trouble getting that taken care of.

The day before the scheduled auction our car died. It was either go to the auction or fix the car. My X and I went to the auction. We had to ride our bikes. The first couple of miles was down sandy dirt roads. FT Stewart is only fifty miles from Savannah, GA. That’s right on the beach. What most people don’t know about the state of Georgia is that it is mostly beach sand. Ever try to ride a bike on dry beach sand. That was why we were late.

Not too late. We only missed a few items. My X was well known for going over budget and keeping us in debt. I made sure she knew what our limit was that day. We could not go over seventy dollars. Turns out I didn’t need to worry. When the lot number for the dishwasher came up for bid, they said the starting bid was going to be twelve dollars and I expected to have competition. I was used to auctions since I had gone to several with my mother. No one bid. We had the only bid. I was stunned when we won.

We had only been there about twenty minutes. So I looked over the rest of the list and we didn’t see anything else that we wanted to bid on. We went and paid for our lot and got a pick up ticked and a map to find our dishwasher. We followed the map and found ourselves out in the large back lot. Everything was well organized and we soon found our lot. Now we had a problem. It was not one dishwasher. It was twelve of them.