Winning the lottery

So I was standing in line to check my lotto ticket. The lady in front of me was also checking hers. The music came out of the machine. The casher got kind of excited. The lady had just won second place, over 100,000.00. She looks at the ticket and said, what am I going to do with this. She was in her late 80’s, with no family or friends left and on top of that she had Cancer. She just liked the idea of wining but never expected to win. It was hard not to say, then trade tickets with me, lol. It was nice to actually see some one win, but I wish it had been my ticket. It is always interesting to see who wins. I like it when it is some one who is on welfare or a single parent or a student.

The best one was when this single mom won. Her husband had just left her, signed over his parental rights as he did not want to pay child support. He wanted to live the high life with out his family, but with the new girlfriend soon to be trophy wife. He did have money, but he left them as high and dry as he could. The day after the divorce was final she bought a ticket, using the money from the divorce settlement, and won the big prize, in the millions. We all laughed at the idea of him trying to get back with her.

Then I was working at a temp. job a few years ago. I was told that the person I was covering for had to take some time off for legal matters. Her husband came home one day, and well out of the blue up and left her. Told her it was over. Started divorce proceedings that day. No explanation or any thing. So they divorced, he gave her custody of the kids, signed over his parental rights (see the theme here). He found a nice apartment, new girlfriend, and then almost a year latter found the winning ticket for several million dollars. He cashed it in. His ex found out about it because the papers made a big deal about how this ticket was found just before the year was up, and how lucky the guy was finding it in time to cash it in. It was just days before it would have been to late to claim. Big news. Well, the legal battle started. Why, because it was purchased when they were still married. He had checked the ticket, found out it was the winning one, came home and told her it was over. He figured that if he cashed it after the divorce she would never know about it, and because it was found after the marital assets had been divided, he would get all the money. He knew he had the ticket, spent a lot of money before cashing it in, got a new place, new car, new boat, and new girlfriend. I found this out because the lady called her place of employment to let them know she would not be coming back. The court decided that as the ticket was purchased when they were still married that she got half of it. Then they got into the fraud aspect of it and that he was hiding marital assets. The end result was that the court turned over part of the divorce settlement. Not only did she get a lump sum of half the money, he now had to pay a large alimony, and child support (but did not get to see the kids), so she ended up with more then half, the kids got a good chunk. The girlfriend left him; he lost his wife and kids, most of his friends, and most of the money. All because he was greedy.

It is interesting to see what things happen when people win. Years and years ago I was up north for a camping weekend. On the way there we stopped for coffee, and overheard people talking about how the town was in trouble, and that the pulp mill (paper mill) was closing, and with it went most of the jobs. It was depressing. On the way home, Sunday, we stopped for lunch at the only dinner in the area, same place we had stopped for coffee. It was a different place. We could hear all these people talking about getting together and buying the mill and keeping the town open. We did not know what was going on. Then we found out that a group of guys who worked at the mill had a lotto pool and they had just won about 20 million on the Saturday. I was kicking myself because I had wanted to buy a ticket on Friday when we got into town, but forgot to. So I always think I was that close to buying the winning ticket. Mind you though, I know the right people won that one. Mind you I don’t know if they did buy the paper mill or not. I do know that they told the newspapers that they were going to try to buy it.

I just keep buying my ticket, it only takes one and you cannot win if you don’t buy at least one. Maybe one day I can tell every one I won.