…Don’t go down that road, Mirlande Wilson.

(Via AoSHQ) In terms of sheer potential karma damage, this woman is simply begging for a backlash.

Workers at the fast-food joint who pooled their cash for tickets are furious at a colleague who claims she won with a ticket she bought for herself and has no intention of sharing.

“We had a group plan, but I went and played by myself. [The ‘winning’ ticket] wasn’t on the group plan,” McDonald’s “winner’’ Mirlande Wilson 37, told The Post yesterday, insisting she alone bought one of the three tickets nationwide that will split a record $656 million payout.

OK.  Assuming 15 people, my best guess is that the 105 million dollar payoff becomes seven million bucks apiece in a lump sum, and/or just under 373 thousand dollars a year for the next quarter century. …I’ve worked for the Scotsman; I know what it’s like.  The difference in lifestyle that you’d get from going from $7.50 an hour to 7 million a year is not actually all that different from going from $7.50 to 373 thousand a year.  More to the point… if you’re the bagman for the group lottery pool, you do not [expletive deleted] buy your own tickets on the side.  That’s because [expletive deleted] like this might happen.  You got a problem with that?  Fine.  Don’t be the bagman*.

This is a pretty tangled story, by the way: one that could very easily end up in court to determine who bought what and when and for whom.  You think that this is going to eat up the lottery winnings real quick? – Because I think that it’s going to eat up the lottery winnings real quick.  Just split it, and somehow suffer under an annual stipend that dwarfs my family’s annual income…

Moe Lane

*Seriously, this is an actual taboo and everything.  If you’ve never done a pool… figuring out who to trust to buy the tickets for the group isn’t a trivial exercise.  If for no other reason that the temptation to turn $200 of lottery ticket money into $100 of lottery tickets and pocket the rest (because, realistically, you don’t expect to win anyway) is also not a trivial one.

5 thoughts on “…Don’t go down that road, Mirlande Wilson.”

  1. Before the drawing they had tips on NPR for how to do office pools. . . yes I listen to NPR. . . Making copies of the group tickets and distributing those to the group was one of them.

  2. Fox and Friends had the interesting idea of looking at the time stamps of the tickets. If they are all within seconds of each other, that supports (but not prove) the idea that it was part of the group. If it was clearly bought at a different time, then that would support (but not prove) her claim. Still, the best bet is to not be part of a pool in the first place. Go get your own darn tickets, the odds are not that different in absolute terms between 1 ticket or 20 tickets.

  3. according to the story you linked to, the group tickets were in the safe at work and then someone else claims they gave her $5 for the group and she was supposed to get those tickets on the way home that night. She probably should have told the last minute person to go get their own.

  4. * Seriously, this is an actual taboo and everything. If you’ve never done a pool… figuring out who to trust to buy the tickets for the group isn’t a trivial exercise. If for no other reason that the temptation to turn $200 of lottery ticket money into $100 of lottery tickets and pocket the rest (because, realistically, you don’t expect to win anyway) is also not a trivial one.

    Similar to the commodity futures market, where it’s called “fraudulently assigned trading” … unless your name is Hillary Rodham Clinton, in which case people claim you simply made a brilliant set of picks, and you’re hailed as a genius.

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