It all started with one of my bosses coming up to me with a "Lotto Captain" kit that his wife got for me before Christmas. It was a box and in it was a baseball cap with "Lotto Captain" embroidered on it, a Lotto Captain whistle, a Jackpot whiteboard to post the current Mega Millions and Super Lotto Plus Jackpot amounts on and a play slip holder.
I put the box in my cupboard in my office and kind of forgot about it since so much was going on in the office between the Thanksgiving holidays, Christmas and New Years celebrations. One day after New Years I was in the cupboard and noticed the box again. So I took it down, opened it up and started checking everything out. I decided that I would go ahead and see if anyone was interested in doing a lottery pool. So, I put on the Lottery Captain hat, hung the whistle around my neck, found out what the current jackpots were for the Mega Millions Lottery and the Super Lotto Plus and started walking around the office looking for interested participants. This was in the beginning of January. So every week we would play the Mega Million on Tuesdays and Fridays, and The Super Lotto Plus on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Sometimes we wouldn't win anything, other times we would win anywhere from $1 to $10.
On Tuesday, Feb. 19th I had collected the money for the Mega Million Lottery for that night. At lunch I went to the Arco station where I normally would buy our tickets and the Lottery machine was broken. So I had to go down the road to the Mesa Spirts and Wines and buy our tickets there.
Wednesday morning I asked our HR person if she could print out the draw results for the night before so I could check our numbers. The first thing I do is check to see if we matched the Mega number as that means we won something right away. Sure enough, we matched the Mega number. So next I continued checking numbers. I started with the first 3 numbers and went through the tickets. On one line 2 of those numbers were a match, I also noticed that we had the Mega number on that same line. So I checked to see what the last two numbers were and then looked at my line again. They matched! We had 4 out of 5 numbers and the Mega number! My hands started shaking as I couldn't believe what I was seeing. So I tried to keep breathing and concentrating on checking the rest of the lines on our ticket. Once I got through them all and then looked again at our winning line I put on my "Lotto Captain" hat and whistle and walked down to our HR's office to have her make sure that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. She took one look at me wearing the hat and whistle, carrying the ticket and the draw results sheet and asked if we had won? I just said, "I need you to look at this and make sure that what I'm seeing is right." I told her to get out a ruler so we could put it under the line and then we compared the numbers, one by one. She started screaming and I started blowing the whistle! We had just won $17, 292.00!!!! The others in the office came running. Some thought we had seen a rat and others figured out that the whistle was the lottery whistle and came running. We all screamed for a bit before we got things under control. Everyone started calling the people that had participated to let them know the good news. We had 32 participants. After taxes we will each get about $405. Not a fortune but still fun!
Yesterday we went and took pictures at the liquor store with the owner where we bought the ticket, had lunch at The Corner Bakery to celebrate a co-workers birthday and then headed over to the Santa Ana California Lottery office to turn in our winning ticket and paperwork. What a day! So much fun. I don't think we have had a more exciting day in the office before!
