Sounds neat, hope the price was right.
Once back in my youth (post USAF but pre-brain function) a friend and I got interested in a Government auction which had Post Office vans in it. These were 2wd Jeeps that had the controls on the right (but wrong) side. Nice roll up door in back, cute lil buggers. We kicked the tires, checked the dipsticks, ran the engines, and tried the trannys in low, drive, and reverse but were not allowed to move them. We wanted a couple for ourselves but weren't sure how much to bid SO...... we bid on all the "good" ones. Some low, some medium, and a couple fairly high. We made our bid price end in 69 cents so we would know it was us. Figured we'd take the cheapest two we could and ignore the rest. Well, we were, in a word, naive (stupid is closer). Seems the US Government has rules. You don't need to know the rules to bid but they apply anyway.
We got nearly every unit we bid on and that is as close to good news as there was. The bad news was in two parts: 1. you are charged/fined by the Government 1/2 of the bid price to NOT take the item. 2. Between us we didn't have enough ready cash to pay for all of them, we didn't even have enough to pay to not take them.
Got short term loans from friends, paid for the units and ran an advertisement to sell them off. Not looking for a profit, just recoup our loaned capital. My mom and her second husband took two for their business. A college friend then in Tuscon took one sight unseen but we had to deliver it (drove two out, gave him his pick, and drove the other home again. Sold several to a guy in the icecream vending business (Alice's Ice Cream, after Alice's Resturant). Sold one to a young man who worked for me part time (became a micro-motor home). Then with only a few left to sell to the general public via the newspaper, a guy comes into our storefront operation (sold auto stereo stuff in front and developed oceanographic instruments in the back) and flashed a badge on me. He was from the DMV in response to a complaint that we were running an unliscensed used car lot. He had a signed complaint from a liscensed car lot and a copy of our newspaper advertisement.
I told him the whole story from the naive bidding on and showed him the paper work on what we paid and who took how many. I stressed the part where we would be charged to not take them and couldn't withstand that financial hit. He was only mildly amused and said he would not haul us in this time but would make an official report and that if he had to come back on a similar complaint we wouldn't be able to tell the judge we didn't know any better.
Pretty funny looking back at it but a bit stressful at the time (still we laughed at ourselves a lot).
To put this in perspective: This is the same storefront and the same friend who shot the .44 mag through the wall, by accident, into the Mex resturant next door. We were the epicenter of strange happenings.
Patrick