Slave Auction

As part of the fundraising for their halfway day--the day that is exactly half way through their degree, and they go off skydiving and partying and stuff like that--every year the third years hold a slave auction. At this event, groups of third year vets perform talent acts and then you can bid on them. If you win a group of slaves, you get them for two hours worth of work. The advertisements suggested having them clean your flat or be your best friend at a party and make you look cool. It is traditional for the other years to chip in and buy a set of slaves.

The average price for slaves was about $200, and they ranged between $100-$300. Everyone in our class gave the class rep $2, so with 100 people in our class that was just enough to buy one set of slaves. Our plan was to have them clean up after the First Year-Second Year party (that didn't actually happen so I'm not sure what we'll use them for). We kept getting outbid, and just barely managed to snag the last group for sale.

Most of the groups just did dances. One of them poked fun at our professors with rewritten lyrics. My favorite group was one that dressed in black morph suits, turned out the lights, and had glowsticks taped to their bodies in a stick figure shape. My second favorite was a bunch of people dressed up like cookie monster. I particularly liked this one because they had a huge amount of homemade cookies that they kept throwing into the audience. I got one.

One of the groups that didn't do a dance had this idea to sweeten the deal. You see, if you bid on them, you also got to take home your very own prosthetic leg. One of the bidders was a guy with crutches.

Another set of slaves was in the form of a barbershop quartet.

And, because it wouldn't be a vet event without random nudity, the audience somehow coerced the MC into taking his clothes off. I think that happened because the last set of slaves, a group of four guys, had already gotten some clothes off: when the bidding petered out, they kept offering to remove something if someone made a higher bid. Yeah, those were the ones we won.