I won the lottery

[calimac]

Oh, relax, it was only $50; but nothing like this has ever happened to me before, and I've never seen a description of what actually happens when you do, so I'm writing about it here.

At Easter, our niece passed out scratch-off lottery cards as a kind of party favor. I got two of them. One of them I couldn't figure out the instructions for, so after scratching off most of its surface in a futile attempt to understand it, I threw it out. The other made sense, though. It had two 4x4 squares showing various occultish tokens - The Rooster, The Mermaid, The Hand, The Cello, etc - and another section which you'd scratch off to reveal a list of 14 more tokens. Match those up with the ones in the squares, which you could scratch off to keep track, and if you got four in a row on a square you win the amount printed at the end of the row.

According to the lottery's website, 1 in 44 tickets in this game win $50, so it isn't that rare. The instructions say take a small-win ticket to any lottery agent to redeem. So Monday morning I went to a local 7-11 that sells lottery tickets.

What would they do? Would they painstakingly verify that the tokens I'd scratched off on the square matched the ones in the list? Would they demand to know where I'd bought the ticket? (I don't know where she bought them.) Would they make me fill out the name/address/phone/email form on the back of the card?

No, none of those. The guy scratched off an unmarked section of the card, which I guess confirmed it was a winner, and also revealed a barcode which he scanned, probably to let the state know he was on the hook for the money, and then he handed me $50 in cash from the register. That's it. No ceremony, no Bob Barker or anything like that. I gave some of my largess to the homeless guy on the stoop outside.

I've never bought a lottery ticket, but I'm willing to try one if it's given me. This is about the fourth time that's ever happened, and the first one that's come up a winner however petty. These tickets cost $10 each, and I'm sure our niece spent a lot more than $50 to acquire her stash. So that explains where all that lottery money comes from, and that's why I'm not buying any tickets.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Very sensible of you!

Congratulations in any case.

[ethelmay]

My dad used to say the lottery was a tax on people who were bad at math. Nonetheless he bought a lottery ticket once a week. He said he approved of the thing they were funding, and it was better for someone like him who could afford it and didn't have a gambling problem to buy them, and also, hey, he might win. (He did not win.)

[calimac]

My disapproval of the lottery, as a political process, besides its being a tax on people bad at math, is 1) not enough of the money goes to what it's supposed to be funding (education), 2) legislators use the lottery as an excuse to cut back on legislative funding of education, so the schools don't wind up any better off.

[ethelmay]

Yeah, I agree.

[sturgeonslawyer]

"Of course the game is rigged! Don't let that stop you; if you don't play, you can't win." -- Robert A. Heinlein writing as Lazarus Long

We do buy lottery tickets, when the prize is very large; we've never won anything bigger than $20, but that isn't the point. What we're buying for $2 (and we won't buy the $5 ones) is the right to fantasize, for a few days, about what we'll do with our winnings. Cheap dreams.

[athenais]

Winning seems like it might be fun, but I have years of not winning at things to make me completely uninterested in actually buying lottery tickets. If anyone ever hands me some to play I'll report back. Congratulations on your $50!

[kevin_standlee]

I won $100 once, which was exciting. In the very first California Lottery game, all those years ago, one of my uncles won $10,000, which was enough to buy a used car that he liked, so that was nice.

No lottery in Nevada, due to it competing with an important state industry, but I'll go over to the place just over the state line at Verdi when the super-lotteries get big enough for me to feel justified in making the fifty-mile trip. The only minor problem with doing that is that if I win a minor prize like $2, I rarely feel like it's worthwhile collecting it, and I've forfeited a couple such prizes by failing to claiming it. I hope that money goes into the Schools fund, too.