In preparation for the newspaper's move to the new building, the New York Times has been auctioning off stuff from the old building on West 43rd Street. But not everyone left happy! Our spy reports:

I had been hearing all week that people were down there fighting each other tooth and nail, so yesterday afternoon I headed down to see things for myself. A lot of the items up for sale were complete garbage. For example, there were numerous "works of art" that looked like they had been ripped off the wall of a fast food restaurant. Some of the stuff was literally garbage—people were paying through the nose for the dingy signs that used to hang in the pressroom.

There were some framed photos that were pretty good, but they weren't really anything you can't find in the Times Square souvenir shops. All of this stuff was going for exorbitant prices, because people were getting, as I heard many say, "caught up in the spirit of the auction." From what I saw this was a euphemism for "we're a bunch of competitive crazies." Seriously, the plates that used to be up in the cafeteria sparked off feeding frenzies as closing time approached, there were actually people screaming for these random China plates.

There were all kinds of cases of cheating. People hiding bid sheets, or holding them in their hands so others couldn't bid as the deadlines approached. When I was there, I saw people frantically sneaking in illegal bids as they shouted that time was up. It was nuts.

The supposedly best items that were auctioned off were the globe lamps that used to be in front of The Times building. Some of these went in the live bidding on Monday that the Observer wrote about, but the rest were auctioned on this blog-like thing on the Times intranet in the past two days.

Word around the newsroom is that people were pretty pissed off that some folks who haven't been here that long got their hands on the globes. We all had the chance to buy them, but people were mad, because they tried to be cheap and submit bids at the last second, but ended up too late. I guess some of the Times vets just haven't mastered this whole Internet thing enough to submit a blog comment on a deadline.