Jan. 15--We know what you were thinking. Winning the $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot was going to be a very serious responsibility. So you had it all thought out: whether to take the lump sum or accept the annuity payments, who would join the board of your charitable foundation, how you'd keep your job for a few months while getting accustomed to the new lifestyle.
Yeah, right.
If you won that mega jackpot the next anyone was going to hear from you was a selfie from Vegas on Instagram.
Whatever the dreams (and oh! did we have dreams) they're dashed now, except for the lucky few in California, Tennessee and Florida who will share the record riches from Wednesday night's Powerball drawing.
Big lottery prizes aren't a new phenomenon, but this one was Trumpian in scope: worth more than a billion dollars and nobody could avoid hearing about it.
Why was Wednesday's jackpot, the first to cross the billion-dollar mark, so big? This was not a freak occurrence. In October, the association of state lotteries that operates Powerball intentionally raised the odds of winning a jackpot by adding more numbers to the game. Previously, the odds of winning were 1 in 175 million. Now they're 1 in 292 million, which makes rollover games more likely, thus increasing the gaudy payout and generating more publicity and more ticket sales. In that sense, mission accomplished.
You knew winning was almost impossible, but still you banked on the "almost." You heard all the wild measurements that showed just how (almost) impossible it was.
Here's one: It's 239 million miles from the earth to the moon. We're thinking of a mile marker between here and the Sea of Tranquility. You're more likely to guess it than to win Powerball.
And another, courtesy of a math professor: Look at a soccer field and identify the winning blade of grass. Sorry, wrong blade.
Not to sound bitter, but there is something grating about the state lotteries association deciding that odds of 1 in 175 million were too good. Something unsettling about a system that draws all those dollars out of all those pockets with the lure of possibly minting a billionaire. Hmm, does that sound bitter?
OK, we played. And the price was worth the chance to indulge in the fantasy of scoring a staggering amount of money, contemplating the good works we'd do (after contemplating the vacations we'd take), contemplating life as a gazillionaire, even after taxes.
It was fun while it lasted.
