The Multiplier
Georgetown, Kentucky-
I’m not a gambling kind of guy. The most I will do is get $10-$20 worth of tickets when the Mega Millions lotto gets up to a couple hundred million. Most people don’t know that the odds of winning the whole thing (picking 5 numbers, plus the bonus number) are over 1 in 175 million. So the reality is any one person’s chances of winning a mega lotto are astronomically low. Yet, there is a lotto drawing twice a week, and eventually someone always wins the big money and the winners don’t usually seem to be more than a month or two apart (at the most) .
Pamela Ivey of Georgetown, Kentucky, was a lotto player. She went into an Apple Market and played the way she normally did. Ivey picked her numbers, but the clerk who checked her out accidentally used what is called the multiplier feature of the lotto, which added one extra ‘bonus’ number on the end, but also made her ticket go from $5 to $10. Pamela had the option to decline the inadvertently picked multiplier, but instead she glanced at the cashier’s name tag and thought, ‘Oh Susan, don’t do that to me.’
Pamela Ivey couldn’t afford the extra $5, but instead of declining it she went ahead and took it. When she looked for the winning numbers for the lotto drawing, her correctly picked numbers won her an amazing $250,000. But what about the accidental Multiplier number? Well, thanks to cashier Susan’s mistake, the Multiplier was correct too, and Pamela Ivey walked away with a cool million dollars, thanks the the multiplier number (that she didn’t want) quadrupling her winnings. After taxes, Ivey banked $690,000.
The moral of the story: Thank You, Susan!!!! I think someone owes you lunch…..or maybe a new car.
