By Jim Hagarty
2017
Some guys have all the luck.
Like the man in Oregon who got lucky three times.
First of all, Joemel Panisa woke up one day last month to a heck of a snowstorm. So, lucky for him, he got the day off work. And if it hadn’t snowed so heavily, the next two lucky incidents probably wouldn’t have happened.
Joemel decided to use his day off in a way I wouldn’t have thought to do. Before I retired, a day off for me usually meant couch time, potato chips and TV. But not good old Joemel. He decided for some reason to get busy and clean his house. I feel sorry for the guy as he does not own a self-cleaning house like I have.
While he was straightening up his office, Mr. Panisa found an envelope with a lottery ticket inside. It was almost a year old. He showed it to his wife who got busy and found out that the ticket was a winning one. Stroke of luck number two.
And not only was the ticket a winner, it was worth $1 million.
But here’s the REALLY lucky part. The ticket would have expired in eight days. If he hadn’t claimed it on time, the money would have been sent to Oregon’s Economic Development Fund.
So Mother Nature came through for Joemel. No snow, no million dollars.
If that happened to me, and I didn’t get the ticket in on time, my family would be lucky if I didn’t climb up on the roof and do a header onto the patio.
On a related note, a few Canadian lottery tales to tell.
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Years ago, when the big lottery prizes got going, a woman in Alberta went to her husband and told him she had had a multi-million dollar ticket but had thrown it in the garbage. The man hired an excavation company to go through the local landfill with a bulldozer and earth mover to see if the ticket could be found. After a few days, the woman told her husband she had found a piece of paper with the ticket’s numbers on it and the ticket was not a winner after all. The landfill excavation bill was over $200,000. I sure hope for better and for worse kicked in for that couple.
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A truck driver near Toronto secretly bought a lottery ticket, hoping for some help in paying for his unemployed wife and her several unemployed brothers who had moved in and lounged around the man’s house all day. He checked his numbers and realized he had won a big-time prize, in the millions. The next morning, he said goodbye to his wife and brothers-in-law, got in his truck, drove to Toronto to pick up his winnings and just kept on driving.
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Another man near Toronto also secretly bought a ticket and realized he had won multi millions. When he bought the ticket, he and his wife were still together but they soon separated. The man waited till the day before his ticket was to expire and then talked his ex-wife into meeting him in a local motel. She agreed and they made sweet love. She still knew nothing about the lottery win. The next morning, the man took off for Toronto to collect his money. But in Ontario, to collect on a ticket of that size, you have to agree to some publicity which the devious husband had no choice but to go for. His ex-wife saw the news about her husband’s big prize and sued him for half of it. She argued in court that they were still together when he bought the ticket and therefore, she should get half. The judge agreed. I can’t imagine why she divorced him.
