blogadelphia: Mondays Missives

Monday, January 5, 2009

Since I was a kid I've entered every contest you can even imagine. In my late 30s I won 200.00 from a Coca Cola Bottlers contest of some type.

I have a friend that wins every time he enters some goofy contest. I told him once when we were at work,"Hey man, they're having some kind of Christmas raffle, you ought to put your name in." He dropped two tickets and won two things. On the way back from picking them up he dropped some change in a machine for a drink. The machine spit out two drinks and a dollar in change for the fifty cents he put in.

When I was a little kid my dad took me to a tractor pull where a garden tractor was given as a door prize. The tickets had it seems a 10 or 12 digit number. I had that thing nailed until the last digit making that night a story my dad would retell countless times until his death,"I thought the little goofball was going to wet himself..."

I know a person that won 40,000 dollars in the lottery. One that got 25,000 and one who won 10,000. The last was a girl who worked for me once years ago. Two weeks before she won her house burned down and the motor in her car had blown about three weeks prior.

I teased my childrens great grandmother once about buying me a pickup after she started talking about everything she was going to do after she won the lottery she said,"I can't do that- that money has to last me the rest of my life!"

She was 63 at the time and as I recall she said the amount for that day was 36 million.

I still like the story of the New Zealander who was asked to recreate a big-ish scratch off lottery win for a tv news show. He scratched it off- the color literally drained from his face, he grasped a counter for support saying,"My God I won 250,000 I just won another 250,000!"

There has been at least one person to win both their states lottery and the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes (and I think there's actually been two) The one I'm certain of though became a single issue politician in California for LGBT issues.

Do people ever consider how they are going to feel when they pass around lottery tickets at Christmas or other occasions and somebody wins big?

At a gathering one time everybody was supposed to bring one and exchange them. I did not bring one but, someone thought I should have one so after scratching it off I looked at it kind of quickly then feigned a look of mild shock and then studied that thing like Watson studied the DNA helix. My look went then back to shock, forcing my face to redden I swallowed hard, looked around then slipped it into my pocket. A few people caught on and said, "Did you win something?" People would then say,"Come on, you can tell me..." for months afterward.

One of my old friends would drive his wife nuts by picking up every scratch off ticket he saw on the ground and check if it was a winner. He would tell her, "One of these days I'll win big and then you'll be singing a different tune!"

blogadelphia