#463 Despair of Tickets

The other day, for no apparent reason, I was checking the Washington State lottery website. Okay, I had a reason, I had found an old lottery scratch ticket and was wondering if it had expired. That got me wondering if there were expiration dates ever on lottery scratch tickets. Well lo and be hold em, the Washington State lottery website has a page completely committed to old lottery scratch tickets. It has pictures of all the different promotions, and next to the picture of each one is a breakdown of which prizes are still outstanding. The promotions are arranged alphabetically so even if, say, “Amazing Eights” is older than “League Night” then it’s still above it on the list. Whoever designed the system spent a lot of time and money making it very slick and user-friendly. I mean, when you get right down to it, if you’re going to spend a dollar for a scratch ticket you want to be sure the latest winning information is up to date and arranged in a graphically attractive spreadsheet on the world wide web. In case you’d like to know, there are 67 different scratch games with prizes still outstanding—ranging in amounts from 50 to 500,000 dollars. That doesn’t even count all the outstanding one and two dollar winners. There’s enough uncommitted money out there to build a really flashy and graphically-intensive website and pay people a ton of money to keep it up. Of course, if it were me I’d give that money to education. You know, proceeds from lottery sales go to support construction projects for K through 12 or something like that. Or maybe they ought to bring students in directly, to intern at the lotto office in skills needed to fleece the poor. There’s a reason part of the website is devoted to telling people about addictive and problem gambling. Be a smart player, they say, know your limits. If they were smart, they wouldn’t play at all. It’s not about smartness. It’s because the people who can least afford to play are the people who play the most. The poor and the desperate and the behind-on-their-debts who are hoping to score big with that one huge lottery win—which never happens. I found it kind of ironic what they named one of the lottery scratch games. They all have catchy names that high paid marketing people have thought up. Like Money Tree and American idol and Cash Crusader. The one I thought was really ironic was called Big Bills. As in I’m gonna win large denomination currency? Or I’m so desperate because I have big bills to pay? And really Washington State Lottery, is it a good idea to name one of your games of chance Money Tree? First of all, it encourages the addictive gamblers fantasy that money grows on trees and secondly, it’s the name of one of the biggest chains of payday cash advance companies in the state. Any way we can divert more of those education dollars into an, um, irony control department?
America, ya gotta love it