Busaholic
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 7 Jun 2014
- Messages
- 14,029
Yesterday would have been my father's 100th birthday. I don't normally buy a full National Lottery ticket these days, resenting the increase in price coupled with the addition of an extra ten numbers to conjure with, but I do on close family birthdays. Anyway, having agreed with my sister that I would buy two, and we would share any winnings (£25 split between us would have been a result!), I went to buy the tickets in a local store before realising that the draw wasn't until today. On enquiring about EuroMillion, which I knew was drawn on a Friday, I was told you could now, for £1.50 a go, choose from between one and five numbers as so-called 'Hotpicks', and getting two numbers right (out of two) would earn you £100, so I duly chose two numbers and bought one.
Now the shop assistant looked vaguely familiar, but not from this shop. She had problems entering my slip into their lottery machine, in the end having to enter the numbers manually. She said, when handing me the lottery ticket, that the misfunction could be a sign of good luck. I expressed doubts, to which she said 'well, I was very lucky once'. I then realised where I'd recognised her from: she had been amongst a group of staff from a local supermarket who had shared the top Thunderball payout of £500,000 a few years back, each syndicate member getting about £33,000. They got a lot of publicity at the time and I believe they all continued with their jobs, because it was a lovely sum of money for each of them without being life-changing (or life-destroying, in some cases). Anyway, checked my two numbers last night and, you guessed it, I'd won £100, the most I've ever won in my life. I'll toast my father tonight, even though he was a teetotaller for the last fifty years of his life and, come to think of it, totally anti-gambling! Yes, my sister will get half, and I've still got tonight's National Lottery to check at some stage.
Now the shop assistant looked vaguely familiar, but not from this shop. She had problems entering my slip into their lottery machine, in the end having to enter the numbers manually. She said, when handing me the lottery ticket, that the misfunction could be a sign of good luck. I expressed doubts, to which she said 'well, I was very lucky once'. I then realised where I'd recognised her from: she had been amongst a group of staff from a local supermarket who had shared the top Thunderball payout of £500,000 a few years back, each syndicate member getting about £33,000. They got a lot of publicity at the time and I believe they all continued with their jobs, because it was a lovely sum of money for each of them without being life-changing (or life-destroying, in some cases). Anyway, checked my two numbers last night and, you guessed it, I'd won £100, the most I've ever won in my life. I'll toast my father tonight, even though he was a teetotaller for the last fifty years of his life and, come to think of it, totally anti-gambling! Yes, my sister will get half, and I've still got tonight's National Lottery to check at some stage.