“We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.”~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Did you buy your lotto ticket? Are you ready? Being a little impatient for the numbers to be drawn? Do you know what you are going to do with all that money?
Guess what? MILLIONS of others have as well. They are feeling just like you! With 14 million tickets being purchased every singe hour. Good Luck!!
Nearly a half a billion dollars is up for grabs for the person fortunate enough to match every last number that is selected.
As wonderful it is to dream about what you will do with all of that cash, the harsh reality is that- you’re probably not going to win the entire jackpot. Your chances of becoming the next winner are so slim that you actually have better chances of dying in funky ways that one wouldn’t even consider.
Let me show you:
Winning it outright, the odds are 1 in 175,711,536.
That’s pretty huge, don’t you think!? I mean, if you bought over 175 million lotto tickets, you’d be CLOSE. But at $1.00 per lotto ticket, and you have spent that much just so that you can beat the odds, you’ve already got a ton of money and don’t need the near half billion.
You would have better odds of getting dealt a Royal Flush in a poker game, than winning the Mega Millions. And that is less than 1 in a million.
I think that my favorite here is that you have a 1 in 112,000,000 chance of getting killed by a vending machine. And that’s nearly the same odds of you winning this lotto.
But there are some very sticky situations with winning the Mega Millions jackpot.
Let’s just say for example that you win it all……… Well, congratulations! 
#1- YOU BETTER HIDE! If you are announced as the winner of all that cash, you had better change your cell phone, your home phone, your pager number, and disconnect your Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook profiles. Hiding is the only way that you are going to be safe from people who are out to get their hands on your winnings.
#2-RELATIONSHIPS ON THE ROCKS! Marriages crumble, so do your friendships and relationships. You have all of this purchasing power and even though the people in your inner circles are actually FAMILY, they will suck you dry as well. And because they are family, you will at first, be more than glad to help them. But what are you going to do when that one family member gets a little financial boost from your golden heart, and you begin to hear from them every other week wanting more? The lover that you have been with for so long will want to marry you quicker than you can correctly say “Absinthe”. And it would be for all the wrong reasons. If they cared, they’d love you just the same before you were the winner. Others who know you are the big jackpot winner will try to woo you in order to get closer to you. If you are the winner and are single, look out for all of the proposals!
#3- FUTURE FINANCIAL WOES! A lot of the times big lotto winners go and blow their stash. But instead of paying for every new home, car, and jet ski in cash, they use credit. And it ruins everything. Especially if the winner just keeps spending everything on credit and then eventually becomes broke and cannot pay their bills. Ultimately, they become bankrupt.
#4- HEALTH PROBLEMS! I am speaking more of mental health issues than anything. Sure there are those who just go crazy and live the party lifestyle and get hooked on drugs and alcohol… because they can. But sometimes winners will have to run away because those whom they thought were their friends, were nothing but greedy people. And now they’ve have turned down a dark path, having to BUY new friends. They become lonely and depressed. Especially if the money runs dry. They run the high risk for suicide.
#5- LEGAL ISSUES! With as many millions of people playing the same game out of so many states in the United States, there’s bound to be a couple of lotto tickets with the same numbers. And that will mean you will have to share it. You run the risk of being dragged into court because that other winner wants YOUR share! And you have to spend tons and tons of money to prove that you are a legit receiver of what you won. It could drag on and on until your money is vanished.
Now that I have farted into your Cheerio’s… allow me to piss into your Corn Flakes!
All day long, I’ve seen nothing but “Shared photos” on Facebook. These photographs were of Mega Millions lotto tickets. And they promised that if you “Like/Share” the photograph, you will be included in who gets the near half a billion dollars, should that specific lotto ticket be the big winner.
So I investigated one particular photo. It had over 200,000 likes and shares. Do you honestly believe that this person who has posted this photograph of their lotto ticket is going to go back and go through a list of over 200,000 names to give them a piece of the jackpot? No way!! They are going to get tired after going through a few hundred names and then give up because they see that there’s not going to be much of anything left for themselves.
Do you see why avarice and greed is one of the “Seven Most Deadly Sins”?
But the heck with all of that. I’ll take my chances of dating a supermodel. And that is only 1 in 178,100. A thousand times better than winning this Mega Millions. I’ll select Céline Dion (even though she is not technically a supermodel) since today is her 44th birthday, and ask her out to dinner. I’ll have better chances of having her (and her husband) saying “yes” to going out, rather than winning all of this cash. And even that is pretty big odds in itself.
Good luck, lotto players.
Dambreaker 