"Steven Lang" (StevenLang)
04/17/2015 at 13:48 • Filed to: None
4
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"Steven Lang" (StevenLang)
04/17/2015 at 13:48 • Filed to: None | 4
| 2 |
Used car dealers from northwest Georgia aren’t exactly a good fit for corporate America, or any part of America for that matter.
Lucky for guys like me, I found this out early on in life. At the ripe young age of 24, I dropped out of a job that made me make numbers dance on a computer for hours on end and became...
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A ringman.
A ringman is the guy pictured in black. His job? He makes funny sounds.
He hoots, hollers, and helps the auctioneer create the urgency to buy. That annoying guy trying to get you to bid again on a porcelain frog made during the Carter presidency? I was that guy sadly enough. Except I was doing it with cars that came from the wrong era of American industry.
Five to seven auctions a week, my job was to point at a crowd of tired and haggard looking car dealers and go, “YEEEPPPP!!!!!” at the very top of my lungs. Needless to say, I wasn’t popular with those guys either.
But luck would have it that the public auctions were attracting Latino customers in droves, and I was the only aspiring auctioneer in north Georgia who could speak Spanish beyond the words, “Taco Bell”.
I soon found myself selling cars on the auction block. Thousands of them.
Every... single... week...
I would drive 40,000 miles a year through four different states going to every single sale that would employ a 20-something with an incurable northern twang and an insatiable love for, “the bidness”.
$100 Volkswagens that were worth more dead than alive were sold right along side $50,000 Rolls-Royces that were worth more than everything I rightfully owned at that time.
My job was to sell and to make every car that was bad seem, well, interesting.
A car that was smoking out of it’s tailpipe would be sold as, “It drinks! It smokes!” It hangs around the bad boys!”
When I had a car on the tail end of it’s life, which was often, I would have to explain,
“Look folks. You can’t buy a good lawnmower for $300! I’m selling a car! Hey, folks, does that thing run? Does the engine sound good? Hey driver. Rev up that engine a few times!”
I had no more than minute to sell whatever was in front of me at the time. At the dealer auctions, that minute was shrunken down to about every twenty to thirty seconds where I would try to find someone, somewhere, somehow.
In my free time, I would hustle my ass off and buy cars whenever the opportunity was there . If I could find a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! that I thought was worth a flip. I would buy it.
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The first three cars I owned cost me all of $2000 and when my wife demanded I find her a car that was built in the same decade we lived in, I finally broke down and bought her a two-year old Escort with an automatic transmission and, what we call a base car’s features in our business, “Power nothing!”. Three years later I sold it for the same price I bought it for. It would represent the best $5000 I never spent.
These days my life’s work can be summed up in three words, “Cars, cars and cars”. I buy cars. I sell cars. I fix cars. I finance cars. I read about cars, and I even dream about visiting the most beautiful places where, obviously, a gorgeous car and a racetrack will be waiting for me.
Cars are my life. So let me open a few pages of my travels with you. Feel free to click !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! or !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! if you have some free time today , and thanks for coming by.
Party-vi
> Steven Lang
04/17/2015 at 14:08 |
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I have dishonored myself by following those links to TTAC.
*reaches for tant*
JimJamJollop
> Party-vi
04/17/2015 at 17:37 |
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Steve did a lot of great writing for TTAC and was a key reason I kept checking them regularly. As a reference source, I’m glad his work is still accessible there.
To anyone else who gave up on TTAC in despair at their bizarrre Pinochet inspired policy of “disappearing” the writing talent silently on the middle of the night without a trace, Derek Kreindler seems to have managed to get a few of them to come back. Maybe one day Steve will write a tabloid style tell-all autobiography ... here’s hoping!