A Day Late and $12 Million Short?
Wow. This is the very definition of "suck."
Reuters is reporting on the good luck of a Johannesburg man, come one day too late.
Deaf hardware store cleaner Stanley Philander had the numbers that won the record $12 million rollover (91 million rand) lottery in South Africa on Friday.
Problem was, he bought it after the numbers were selected, which means, that if those numbers just happen to come up again in next weeks drawing, Stanley is golden. Not quite as golden as if he had won this week, however.
No one had won in 22 tries before Friday, pushing the prize money into record territory. This week's actual winner was an unnamed 43-year-old woman.
Let's face it, not only is poor Stanley in the midst of a huge letdown at the moment, but that ticket of his is useless. The chances of the same numbers being drawn in back to back lotteries are astronomical.
Adding to Stanley's drama, he was whisked away to an undisclosed location to shield him from the inevitable well-wishing of distant relatives and unremembered acquaintances. But no one knows who it was that was doing the whisking.
Philander's sister in law said that the family — Stanley's wife, who is also deaf and their two children — had been taken to a safe place, presumably by lottery officials.
Thembi Tulwana, a spokesman for the lottery said they had nothing to do with moving Philander. "We didn't even know where he was," he said, indicating that the culprit had been a local Johannesburg newspaper.
It's just this sort of good luck that helps us appreciate plain old run-of-the-mill bad luck.
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