Based on the tales of the three lottery winners listed below, there are a great many people who are very nonchalant when it comes to how their lottery tickets are cared for once they are bought.
Immediately after purchasing their lottery plays, all of them put the tickets in the sun visor of the vehicle they were driving at the time.
The commonality in their stories about what happened next begins to diverge at this point.
But in each instance, the haphazardly placed piece of paper known as a lottery ticket transformed from being worth an insignificant amount of money before the draw into a major prize winner afterwards.
Here is what happened next.
The Oregon Car Visor
Unbeknownst to Ronald Ceci of Oregon, USA, the car he was driving had a winning American Powerball ticket worth 2 million dollars in it.
He purchased the ticket for a Saturday draw. Ceci said he put his ticket in the sun visor of his car and didn’t check it until Wednesday.
When he stopped by the store to scan the ticket, the clerk was more nervous than he was when he found out he won.
“He was very excited and shaking,” Ceci said. “He gave my wife a hug and was shaking like a leaf.”
The retired cabinet builder said he had home improvement projects planned for the money.
photo: surfky.com
The Kentucky Truck Visor
Troy Pollard of Kentucky, USA put the American Powerball ticket he purchased at the beginning of January of this year in the visor of his truck and forgot about it.
It took him almost two months before he discovered it.
Cunningham said he decided next to stop off at a store to buy another ticket and check the one he’d just found. The clerk scanned it and told him it was for more than they could pay. That’s when another customer took the ticket to the self-ticket checker and it showed it was a $50,000 winner.
“This is unreal, I just couldn’t believe it,” Pollard said. “To think, this thing has been hanging on my visor since I bought it.”
photo: www.national-lottery.co.uk
The Boston Van Visor
Andrew Clark of Boston, UK bought a Euromillions ticket in November 2018 and then put it in the visor of his work van amongst a growing bundle of lottery tickets he was stockpiling.
It took him six weeks to decide to check his plays. And that was only because his partner Trisha and niece Louise had kept urging him to do so. They’d had heard about an unclaimed prize in the news.
“It was something of a standing joke that I had all these tickets while there was a local prize outstanding, so for weeks they were on me to check,” Clark recounted to the lottery commission.
There had been media reports swirling that a jackpot winning ticket worth £76 million had been sold in the area but had yet to be claimed.
Finally, Clark said he ‘gave in’ and checked the stash of tickets.
“I got the bundle out of the van and started to work my way through them, methodically from the oldest to the most recent… I certainly didn’t expect it to end with me saying ‘I’ve done it, I’ve won £76M.’”
Flaws in the System
If these big winners are storing tickets in the sun visor of the vehicles they drive, it stands to reason that so many more people are handling their lottery tickets in the same manner.
When a lottery ticket is initially purchased, it really is worth a very inconsequential amount.
It simply doesn’t feel important in the moment to treat that little piece of paper like it is worth more than diamonds.
Why not stick it in the sun visor? What could go wrong?
Well actually a lot could go wrong. Vehicles get stolen. It’s improbable. But there is no mistaking that it happens from time to time.
For Mr. Ceci of Oregon who checked the ticket riding around his sun visor quite promptly, the risk of disaster doesn’t seem incredibly great.
But it is a fact that for a few days there, the insignificant ticket that turned him into a multi-millionaire was a broken window away from disappearing.
Mr. Pollard from Kentucky essentially carried along with his regular day to day life for two months with $50,000 riding along with him in his sun-visor.
Is it fair to wonder how many times that sun visor went up and down during that span of time? How close did that winning ticket ever come to landing on the floor?
As for Mr. Clark… I just can’t help but think his system of amassing tickets in his work van to be checked eventually really seemed to be tempting fate.
The £76 million winner told reporters of a previous occasion in the summer when his stash of lottery tickets blew out of his van window. He said he was relieved “that hadn’t happened again.”
Are you kidding me!?
Thankfully for all three of these winners, everything worked out in the end.
In fact, Mr. Clark has showed up in news reports this week announcing his latest car purchase. Since his lottery windfall, he has splashed out on six supercars – including a McLaren, a Porsche and a Ferrari.
