Mr Showerhead's blog: "???"

There is guy that comes into work all the time. And you can tell, JUST by looking at him, he's a real piece of shit. Some things have... "happened" at work and we KNOW its him that did it, we just have no way of proving it. Well, he comes in today with two "lady friends" and they sit down and start scratching lotto tickets. One of the ladies comes up and said "I dont understand this, can you double check it to see if I won?" Fine, I deal with stupid people ALL day anyways, so Im used to it. So I run it through and "FILE CLAIM" pops up. So I tell her that she has won more than what we're allowed to pay out. In Illinois, anything over $600 has to be paid by the lotto offices because Uncle Sam needs his cut. So I tell her to go downtown to the Thompson Center to cash in the ticket. She looks at it and asks how much she won. I look at it again, and Im checking all over the ticket to see why she would have to go downtown to cash it in. And after adding up all the possible prizes on the ticket, its only worth like, $82. So I was a lil confused. I told her maybe the ticket was old, that even though the game itself is still current, the ticket itself might be too old. She goes back to her seat and continues scratching.

About five mins later, the guy comes up, throws a different ticket at me, and says "cash it" (Hes a REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAL ignorant piece of shit) So after expressing my being annoyed with him, I run it through the machine, and "FILE CLAIM" pops up again... Which, right away, I found to be a lil odd. So I throw the ticket right back at him and tell him the same thing, he has to go down to the Thompson Center to get his money. (The ticket was only worth $30) And of course he is getting an attitude about it. We tell him if the machine says we cant cash it, we cant cash it. He's going on about what a bunch of bullshit this is, and he was THIS CLOSE to playing the race card.

So my boss calls up the Hotline to explain what was going on. He tells the guy on the phone the story, asks for the ticket and starts reading the serial number off to the guy on the phone. He then  turns around and tells the guy that handed him the ticket, that we were right, the ticket itself was too old. And even though the game is still current, the ticket is old and he would have to go to a lotto office to collect. He then told him, that even though he is collecting at an office, taxes wont be taken out of any claim under $600.

The guy and the two ladies have a few more beers, scratch a few more tickets each, they get a few more winners that we cant cash because the tickets are too old, and then they leave. About ten minutes after they leave, my boss comes up to me and says "Want a good laugh?" I say sure. He tells me the tickets that the guy had, were stolen out from one of the machines last night. He found that out when he was reading the serial number off to the guy on the other end of the phone. The guy on the other end off the phone explain the tickets were stolen, and then told my boss to tell him to inform the guy he had to come into an office to collect, the tax free part was thrown in there to get him to bring in as many of the winning tickets as he could, because most people are going to go collect $5 if they have to pay a tax on it. He then explained that because the state of Illinois makes a certain percent on every ticket sold, him stealing the tickets is considered a felony, since he is preventing the state from making that percentage, which they said is just like stealing from the government. He also said that when the state actually has cases like this come up, which happens a lot more often then I thought, that they dont go by the price of the ticket when figuring out how to charge them, they go by the sum of the jackpot of EACH ticket turned in. So if he has seven tickets where the jackpot is worth $75,000, the person being busted for stealing the tickets gets charged with the theft of $75,000 X seven (Can we say "Grand theft larcey" boys and girls?) Because the state feels that if the tickets werent stolen, people would have bought them (Which they would have) and that is the prize all those people would have been wanting to win. The guy had 3 STACKS of tickets. There must have been easily, 400 tickets, and the odds on the tickets are 1in5 win, even if its just a break even prize.

I KNOW this guy is going to turn in the tickets, he's THAT predictible. And I cant wait til he does, because theres NO way he'll be able to smooth talk his way out of having THAT many stolen tickets and make it sound believable, which means, I dont have to deal with that worthless piece of shit ever again :)