How I Didn’t Win the Lottery in 2007 Either

More past emails sent out to the lottery players at work. Rereading them now is a little like picking up an old diary and realizing how boring your life actually was. Did I really find the hairy plants on the smoking deck fascinating? Why, yes. I apparently thought them riveting enough to write about. Gees.

April 25, 2007
Tonight’s Powerball drawing is for $57 million. If we win, I’m booking a flight for New York to see the David Letterman show. Usually I can’t stay up late enough to watch him. I like Dave, and I think he would like me. Maybe I’d get to see Charles Grodin or Johnny Depp. Or Tony Randall – is he dead? He’d be fun to see too, but not if he’s dead.

May 9, 2007
So an ad coordinator upstairs was telling me about a man out East who won one of the biggest jackpots ever and then his life went in the tank. He gave money to a granddaughter who subsequently died of a drug overdose. He had owned a business prior to winning, and over 200 of his customers decided to sue him.

I figure with a 20-way split, none of us will end up with enough to attract lawsuits. And I’m not giving my grandkids any more money than I do right now, which is plenty and I just hope they don’t get addicted to Skittles.

May 11, 2007
I think winning a few million would be a good Mother’s Day gift. Every year my children ask me what I want and every year I tell them the same thing: I want someone to take my car in for an oil change and a car wash. Apparently this is not a popular gift, even though it says “I love you” just as much as a potted geranium, maybe more.

But a mother can’t complain. A mother has to sit there and take what she gets and never interfere or offer any opinions and try not to be a burden in her remaining years. Yes, winning the lottery would be an excellent Mother’s Day gift.

May 23, 2007
If you have a chance, you might want to stop down at the smoking deck and check out the planters, which now include some kind of grass that looks a lot like long blonde hair. Every time I see it I picture a human head buried in the dirt with just the hair left out to blow in the wind. Someone even braided one of them. This has nothing to do with winning the lottery, it’s just disturbing.

May 24, 2007
Someone not us won the $63 million jackpot last night. I blame it on the hair grass, which is surely bad ju-ju, even though it doesn’t look so much like hair now that it’s wet and kind of greenish.

We’ll be taking up a Powerball collection again next week. It wouldn’t hurt to have your dollar ready. I’ve noticed that some of you aren’t very good with your finances. If you can’t get in a buck for Powerball with a week’s notice, one can only wonder what’s happening to your 401k.

August 7, 2007
Maybe it’s time we asked ourselves, “What am I, (your name), doing to win the lottery?” According to the book The Secret, you can manifest anything you want in your life. I’ve been trying to manifest berries on my raspberry bushes all summer with little success, but influencing nature may be too much to ask. Manifesting six winning Powerball numbers seems more in line with the top secret message, which has been hidden from the public for centuries but is now available in bookstores everywhere.

The point is we need to concentrate, people, or we’ll be buying tickets until the youngest of us retires. A very rich man once said, if a problem can be fixed with money, it isn’t really a problem. This philosophy makes a lot of sense to me, and I’d like to be able to adopt it.