The other day I was at a convenience store and was standing in line. The woman in front of me was taking a really really long time. I noticed that she was buying only lottery tickets, stacks of scratch tickets and a bunch of the "draw" tickets which have to go through that machine so it takes forever. I hate to judge a book by its cover, but this woman was how do I say it.... a future Springer guest. Anyway she finally gets all the lottery tickets and the cashier rings it up and the total is $120. A HUNDRED AND FUCKING TWENTY DOLLARS!!!!! Now that's just lottery tickets, she wasn't buying any Cheetos, Mountain Dew, Twinkies or any of the other things that her clothes were stained with. She says to the cashier something to the effect "I hope I'm lucky this week". I was pretty annoyed from having to wait for 5 minutes so as she turned around to leave This convo played out...

Me: Do you spend that much on lottery tickets each week?
Her : About a hundred dollars.
Me: Are you fucking serious?
Her: Yeah, so?
Me: Do you know the odds of winning those "draw" lotteries?
Her: No
Me: About 1 in 14 million
Her: blank stare
Me: That's like someone saying to you I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 14, 000, 000 what is it? The chances of it being 25 are the same as it being 13,587,602 or 742,004.
Her: blank stare
Me: Seriously, $100 a week is $5200 a year, if you invested that amount of money each week you would have a nice chunk down the line.
Her: attention seems to have veered off to the shelf of doritos
Me: Forget it
Her: Do you wanna go to Dairy Queen?
Me: ok

So we ate oreo and gummy bear blizzards (her choice) as I explained compound interest and she explained the genius of Larry the cable guy.

Labels: random

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 18, 2006 at 12:26 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.