Woman 'steals' winning $175,000 lottery ticket after coworker takes her gift card
A $175,000 lottery ticket or a $25 gift card for TJ Maxx? I certainly know which one I'd choose.
No offence TJ Maxx obviously... But there's not really any competition.
However, one woman didn't technically knowingly choose one over the other after entering into a game in the office known as dirty Santa or Yankee swap.
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The game sees a group of people take part in a secret Santa-style gift purchasing, but instead of buying an item for a name drawn from a hat, you put all the items in the middle of circle and perform a lucky dip.
To spice things up a bit, as you go round the circle, you can decide whether you want to pick up a parcel or if you want to 'steal' the present the person before you has just unwrapped. And one woman's decision to 'steal' another employee's gift turned out decidedly well.
Office manager Lori Janes from Kentucky, US, was playing the game with the rest of her colleagues from Harmon Dental Centre at their Christmas party in 2022 when she picked up a $25 TJ Maxx voucher and was pretty delighted.
Alas, the next person along from her decided to 'steal' it, with Janes left 'pretty disappointed'.
Thankfully, being the first person to pick up, the game states when everyone has taken their turn, the first player then has the chance to swap their gift for any other player's present.
So, when it came back to her, Janes decided to steal $25 worth of lottery tickets.
Prepare to feel pretty hard done by if all you got in your work secret Santa was a bauble or some chocolate.
As soon as the game came to an end, Janes' team urged her to scratch off her lotto tickets right away.
The first ticket won Janes $50, which was already a pretty good profit - but when she got to the Hit The Jackpot ticket, she was blown away.
The $10 was a winner, meaning she had landed the game's top prize of a whopping $175,000.
"Everyone was going insane. People were getting their calculators out and double-checking. A couple of people even scanned the ticket on the lottery’s app, just to make sure," she recalled to the Kentucky Lottery.
"I couldn’t believe it. It was a $25 gift exchange, and I won $175,000!"
When Janes called her family to tell them the good news, they almost didn't believe her since she never played the lottery.
"We figured she didn't look at it right, but then we heard people in the background celebrating, it became real," her husband told Kentucky lottery officials.
To make sure it was real, Janes' husband and kids came with her to the lottery headquarters to hand in the ticket and walked out with a check for $124,250 after taxes.
After winning, Janes revealed her plans to pay off her daughter's student loans and their car loans.
And I'm sure she was able to spend at least a little of whatever was left on a trip to TJ Maxx.
Poppy Bilderbeck