Mega Bucks results= 0 numbers
Win for Life results= 1 number (no cash value).

I am particularly sad about the Win for Life results. It’s my favorite lottery game to play (and yes, I bought an extra ticket last week because my financial windfall was burning a hole in my pocket). The grand prize in Win for Life is $1000 a week- every week for the rest of your life. This seems like a very reasonable prize to win.

I always read about people who win the lottery and become instant millionaires only to end up sad and alone and somehow broke. On the one hand, I’m willing to take my chances- see if I can beat the odds. But millions and millions of dollars thrust into your life in an instant does seem extravagant, and extravagant is not really my style.

I don’t know this for sure, but I think my style may be to have enough money deposited into my account each week to pay most of my major bills. Yep, I can see that working out real nice.

I got one lousy number on the recent Mega Bucks drawing. As such, I will not be quitting my job today.

After checking my numbers and realizing I was a big loser (hmm, that statement is true on several levels), I proceeded with my standard routine for disposing of tickets: I angrily tore it into one-hundred-million tiny pieces. I have this strange paranoia that I somehow misread the winning numbers, and I don’t want to just throw an in-tact ticket into the recycling box at my desk. The distress of not winning the lottery week after week is already almost more than I can handle. Imagine if I came across this headline in the Oregonian:

Cleaning Crew Finds Winning Lottery Ticket in Trash. Idiot Office Worker’s Loss is Janitor’s Multi-million Dollar Gain!

I realize that the “if I can’t win, no one can” mentality makes me kind of a jerk. Fine. I’m a jerk. But you have to understand that if I ever threw away a winning lottery ticket, and later realized it, I would DIE. It’s just not something I would get over. I cringe as I imagine the things people would say to me about how it just wasn’t meant to be, or how things happen for a reason, blah blah. If someone redeemed my winning ticket I would know exactly where I stand, karmically speaking, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

So, I will continue to manually (and therapeutically) shred tickets. Pay stubs, bills, anything that contains my social security number or other pieces of information useful in the stealing of my identity- those can go wholly into the trash. But not my lottery tickets. NEVER my lottery tickets.

I took my $4 winnings from last week’s Powerball drawing and used it to buy eight Mega Bucks tickets (each mega bucks ticket gives you two sets of numbers, though jackpots start out much lower). I knew I was screwed when I looked at my numbers and five of the eight sets started with the number 3. I hate that number (I’ll expand on this seemingly irrational hatred some other time). Seeing all of those 3’s lined up just made me realize that this “game of chance” is not likely to pay out (yes, I realize this is a conclusion I possible could have come to years ago).

With the writing already on the wall, I waited a few days after the drawing, then dejectedly pulled out my ticket and checked my numbers. Eight chances to win yielded zero dollars. Zero.

The good part about this terrible lottery failure is that it reminded me to stick to my typical strategy: only buy one ticket per week. If I had followed that line of thinking, I could have stretched my previous winnings over the course of 4 weeks. Rest assured, I will not be so foolish with future payouts.

Matched 1 number plus the Powerball.
Prize = $4
Will reinvest winnings for this week’s drawings.
Jackpot, here I come.