I am curious to see if your lottery adventure is as curious as mine. Has this ever happened to you?
An adventure in Lotto Land.
So today I decided to deviate from normal lottery routine. I decided to take my winning ticket to a new store to determine if they are lucky or have a machine with a lucky lottery algorithm.
It’s a liquor store. I do a traversing of the whole store, price some vodka, and exchange formalities with the clerk before I hand my winning ticket over. The ticket is a work of art. I have circled the numbers so delicately and precisel, and marked the winners with a varying assortment of dazzling bright hues. The man takes the ticket and scans it. The winners “tune” plays on the terminal, and before a second even goes by he callously and vigorously tears the ticket. Not once even commenting on the beautiful assortment of bright rainbow colors. I sigh.
18.50 he says, as he hurls the ripped ticket in the trash. 23.50 is the prize I ask? The clerk looks confused, and digs in the trash where he has thrown the “players receipt” also. He takes it out, looks at it, and without showing it to me says. “Oh its 23.00. Give me the 50 cent back.” So I say “Show me the receipt,” still holding the dollars in my hand. Now the man says again “give me the 50 cent back”, now a slight panic in his voice, as if he thinks I am about to bolt out the door with my “extra” windfall. So I say again “show me the receipt”. Finally he turns it around for me to see, and I say ok, and hand over the extra coins. I tell the man “I am going to take this receipt, is that ok?”, and he says, “Oh that receipt is yours.” . (So what was it doing in the trash?) I sigh again.
So I walk out the store whimsically replaying the scene in my head. I put the ticket in my wallet, and then think to myself, “Did I just lose my free plays?” I check all my pockets, double check the wallet and wonder If I am having a senior moment. So I head back to the (now dubious) lucky store, hoping the clerk didn’t try to pull a fast one on me.
“Did you give me my free plays?” The man looks puzzled, and looks at the lottery machine and then once again bends over to look in the trash. He pulls out slowly a ticket that has three games on it.
He hands it to me and says generating some sort of excuse. I ask, “Are you ok? Long day? You are not hitting the sauce back there are you? You almost threw away 70 thousand dollars.”
“I am very sorry sir.”
Rolling my eyes, and making a gesture like Ralph Fiennes in ‘Schindlers List’
I say “That’s ok, "I pardon you” and I walk out.