powerball fantasies

With the Powerball up to an impressive $340 million this past week, I finally broke down and purchased my first lottery ticket. The reason for my lack of lottery interest doesn’t stem from the odds, or an allergy to the shiny silver scratchable surface that must be rubbed off in order to reveal three ‘Pots ‘O Gold’ in order to win $5000 dollars instantly. Rather, my aversion to all things lottery related, both games and the people who play these games, stems back to high school when, for two long months one summer, I worked as a lottery booth attendant.

Before this, I had been working at the pre-bankrupt Phar-Mor. Having hit my six month job tolerance level, a level which even in my youth would foreshadow every job that would come after it, I desperately wanted out of the retail discount store world. A world which was marked by constant weekly specials on two liter bottles of cola and long lines of shopping carts filled to the brim with these special two liter bottles of cola…cola which I was responsible for ringing up and bagging.

It was near the end of my junior year when a friend of mine mentioned that she worked at the lottery booth in the mall and that a position was open. Being familiar with the mall of which she spoke, I was surprised…having never noticed a lottery booth anywhere in the cornucopia of stores which lined the gleaming tiled walkways. The deal was sweetened when she said that employees were allowed to bring a radio or portable television to watch while they worked. Since I never knew the lottery booth existed, I reasoned that many others probably didn’t know of its existence either…and with no customers, I concluded that much watching of television and radio listening would be incurred. A superb way to earn money. Thus I applied and took the job.

Soon after, though, I realized that many more people than I anticipated knew exactly where the lottery booth was and frequented it quite frequently. Worse yet, the customers weren’t comprised of high school aged girls… a topic that interested me much more than the lottery…all of which probably explained why I never noticed the lottery booth in the first place. Instead, the average lottery customer was old. And I soon found out that lottery players take their numbers very seriously.

Elderly players would hobble up to my register and gum their daily numbers to me. Having trouble distinguishing the exact diction of toothless individuals, sometimes I would mistakenly punch in the number 252 when the customer clearly said 242. And upon handing this person their lottery ticket would get a five minute monologue on everything that was wrong with today’s young people, how customer service was so much better in their day, how the nation was going to hell in a hand basket, and how teenagers never listen to anyone. I never really listened, though…but I think that this was the general idea that they were trying to get across.

Midway through the summer, I finally had my fill of the lottery life and left before even getting to enjoy any television time while at work. This also left me devoid of any desire to ever become a lottery player.

Until now. $340 million dollars drew me into the seedy under-belly of the lottery world. But while most people fantasize all the glorious things they would do with their winnings, my day dreams tended to differ slightly. Naturally, I wanted to win big, but rather than dreaming about how I’d spend the money (of which the first thing I would do is rent out Yankee stadium, tee up at home plate, and drive a bucket of golf balls over the homerun fence) I fantasized about telling Dave Letterman and Katie Couric, on national television, how this is the first lottery ticket I ever bought…and isn’t it funny how, when so many hardcore lottery players have been buying them for years and have never won a thing, I buy only one and win $340 million.

And I would go on every talk show that would allow me air time and continue to gladly rub salt into the wound of every lottery player out there that ever gave me a hard time for mistaking their ‘4’ for a ‘5’ on the daily number.

Granted, I might have many people plotting my death, but I figured that $340 million would buy me one kick ass security system and a hell of a body guard.

Unfortunately, like most day dreams, my goal of winning big never happened. No Yankee Stadium. No Letterman. No Katie. And, I can’t help but think that if only I had bought one more. Granted, telling people that ‘these were the first two lottery tickets I ever bought’ makes for a crappy story, but being rich would have surely made up for it.