Even in the midst of a pandemic, the chance to win also countless millions has drawn people from all walks of life to make a trek to a local convenience store or gas station for a lottery ticket.
With 3/4s of a billion dollars at stake, the chance to radically alter your life is the draw to open up your wallet and spend $10, $20, $100 or more on a selection of numbers.
We spoke with a clerk at a small mini market near our studios about the numbers of people he served up tickets over the past few days.
“Uncountable,” he began. “People are buying [tickets] every day, since the jackpot’s turned it’s been crazy. They buy like hundreds, two hundreds, a lot, I sell a lot.”
The chance of hitting all of those numbers is greater than that of being struck by lightning.
But seemingly everybody is going to take the plunge.
But the real fascination behind why people will make that purchase of numbers are the fantastic dreams in the hearts and mind of the players.
Some of which shared them with WWL.
One man has big dreams about starting music schools:
“I’ve always thought about building a school for kids and giving them instruments and music,” he shared. Elaborating, “Looked at a lot of old buildings in the city and I said it would be nice to take these old buildings, and renovate them, certainly for the architecture of the building itself, put kids in there and get some great musicians to come and teach music.”
Another player, a young woman, has a special dream involving reptiles…
“I would start a reptile institution, that’s what I’m in college for, so I can work to rescue reptiles, because they're the most abandoned species in the world as far as domesticated pets go at least.”
Now not everybody wants to move to the world to their whim if they win, as this man articulated to me after leaving a store in the French Quarter where he bought his own tickets.
“I don’t know how to tell you the truth, I would be blown away,” he said thinking out loud. “I might find somewhere to go, far, far, away.”
Still there are players with simple dreams, paying off their debts, taking care of their families, setting up their children so they can go on to higher education and then make their way in life.
Probably the simplest was one man who said if he won he was “going to give it to my wife, since she’s going to get it all anyway!”
With that we shared a hearty chuckle.
The Mega Millions drawing is tonight at 10pm with a jackpot of $750 million. Powerball drawing is Saturday with a jackpot worth $640 million.
Good luck.
