So I'm waiting in line to get a few tickets for tonight's drawing of
The Big Game (
now at an estimated $350 million!), and I'm about five people back in line, when this woman announces, "I want 25 Quick-Picks on 25 separate slips of paper."
Each slip of paper can hold 5 separate sets of numbers for this stupid lottery, which means that if she orders just 25 Quick-Picks, she gets five slips of paper, but she specifically asks for each one of them to be printed on its own individual piece of paper.
I've tried to rationalize this... perhaps she was buying for a group, and each person wanted a different number of tickets - that would explain separate slips, as they'd be easier to dole out. But this is not an isolated incident... I've seen this far too often for it to be just a group purchasing phenomenon. No, these people sincerely believe with all their heart that getting each number on a separate piece of paper increases their chance of winning. I find this amusing to no end.
Now, you could say I'm just as stupid for buying a ticket when my chances of winning are 1 in 76,275,360, but at least I'm not stupid enough to think that having numbers on separate pieces of paper changes those odds at all.
OK, so they're superstitious. I understand that. But they're not too superstitious to let a machine (psuedo)randomly pick the numbers for them? I think that would be first on my list of things to be superstitious about when it comes to the lottery.
And you know, if this woman wins, in her mind it will because, and only because, she was clever enough to ask for 25 separate slips of paper. Sheer brilliance.