When I hit the lottery, I will become a professional blogger

Once every three months or so I find myself in the odd predicament of having 5 dollars that I don't want anymore, and I buy one of these things [to your right].

They draw 6 numbers and you win money if the numbers on your ticket matches some of them. It isn't even necessary to match all 6. You can win something for matching 3, 4 or 5. Matching 5 would get you about $2,500, 4 gets about $60 and matching three only pays you enough to buy another ticket. Of course, the Holy Grail is the 6, which, on a slow week gets $2.5 million.

Most of us have said, at one time or another, "When I hit the lottery" which is followed by a dream paradise or just the sheer pleasure of being able to tell your boss to fuck off. 2.5 million would be enough for me to do that. Hell, right now, I'd do it for sixty bucks.

The hopes and dreams of millions of people hinge on one of these little pink tickets having a lot of matching numbers. I don't think that's fair.

After all, look at the pathetic example on your right. The winning numbers on October 4 were 2-8-15-21-39 and 44. Even if they paid by the ticket I wouldn't have won. I was disappointed but not surprised. I've been in those office lottery pools whenever one of the big jackpots gets ridiculous. Somebody runs out after work, on their own time and stands in line for a while to buy a couple hundred sets of numbers. All of us start dividing the prize by the number of participants before the winning numbers are drawn. That little calculation is usually followed by "That'd be nice", as we peer into our boss' office and begin to write the screenplay of our great departure. Is there a literary limit to the number of obscenities a person can say at one time?

Then of course, the numbers are drawn and when we go to work, we're all just a little sadder to have to look at each other for one more day. I'm holding onto that speech I wrote, though.

The odd thing is that after buying a couple hundred tickets a person would think that there was a reasonable chance of winning something. Then, the conscious part of your brain thinks of all the possible number combinations and reasoned that you could have spent a year's salary on tickets and still not won. If there was even a reasonable chance of that happening, don't you think people would do it? Home equity loans would be tied entirely to one lottery drawing. $50,000 for a chance to make $2.5 million. Sounds like a sure thing, doesn't it? Nope. That's why my five dollars would have been better spent on beer.

The Pennsylvania Lottery lists the odds of hitting their MATCH6 Lotto as 1 in 4,661,272.3. Think about $4.6 million dollars. That's how many lottery tickets you'd have to buy just to have even money odds to "win". That would be the true definition of a phyrric victory. Even a big home equity loan would probably lose out. Plus, you'd have to make sure each ticket had different numbers and you'd have to check them all.

When I hit the lottery, I'll have enough money to hire people to check the numbers on my lottery tickets.