When it comes to winning the lottery, some people go to great lengths to increase their chances of striking it rich. But for one lucky Massachusetts woman, it seems like all she had to do was answer the door for a FedEx delivery.
In a stroke of unbelievable (or perhaps just very fortunate) luck, the woman received $20,000 worth of scratch-off lottery tickets from the delivery company. That’s right, folks – someone out there thought it was a good idea to ship $20,000 worth of lottery tickets to a stranger’s doorstep.
Now, we’re not ones to judge. Maybe the shipping label got mixed up and the intended recipient was actually a professional scratch-off player (if such a thing exists). But given the odds of winning the lottery, we can’t help but wonder if FedEx was playing a cruel prank on this poor woman.
To put things into perspective, the odds of winning a scratch-off vary depending on the game, but it generally falls somewhere between 1 in 3 and 1 in 4. So let’s say that the odds of winning are 1 in 3, and that all of the tickets shipped to the woman were top-tier winners. This would mean that she has a 33.3% chance of winning at least one of them. Not too shabby, right?
Wrong. Because even if our hypothetical numbers held up, the woman would still be facing odds that most of us would find pretty daunting. With $20,000 worth of tickets in her possession, she’d need to win at least $60,000 just to break even. And if she wanted to make a profit, she’d need to do even better than that.
Of course, the chances of all the tickets being winners is infinitesimally small. The reality is that the woman will likely win at least a few (if not many) small prizes, but will ultimately come up short of recouping her $20,000 investment.
So what’s the point of sending $20,000 worth of lottery tickets to a random person? Is this some kind of sick joke? A twisted social experiment? Or is someone out there really that desperate to change their odds of winning?
Perhaps we’ll never know the answer. But one thing’s for sure: the woman who received the delivery is now the unwitting owner of a whole lot of hope – and a whole lot of disappointment waiting to happen.
All we can do now is cross our fingers and hope that the woman manages to recoup some of her costs. And if she does happen to win big, well…we’ll be sure to send our own batch of scratch-offs to FedEx and see if lightning strikes twice.
