Story 127: Sadistic Lottery Scratch-Off Ticket Creator

            You think all those lottery scratch-off tickets are generated by some non-sentient computer?

           You presume incorrectly.  That stuff is outsourced, like everything else, only this went to a human instead of a computer, because computers can’t be programmed to be evil.  Yet.

            Remember THAW: The House Always Wins.  Life would be so much easier for everyone if they only understood that universal truth, but they all strangely think that they can beat a system that is specifically designed for them to fail.  The few who do win are allowed to only so the authorities can’t call "Shenanigans!" on the whole thing.

            In my field, I am an artist.  Just because my subject is numbers and my medium is silvery film, those do not make it any less of an art.  My task is to create an infinite combination of losers, with a dash of the hope of a win that culminates in that much larger magnitude of defeat.

            My favorite is choosing numbers that are one digit away from the winning set they are supposed to match.  Ah, I can just hear the screams of loss resonating across gas stations and convenience stores everywhere.

            I also like making up the little clip art the scratched-off film reveals, just like a slot machine, except with more effort and less noise.  One time I snuck in dirty pictures on every twentieth ticket just to see what would happen, but I never heard any complaints so I guess no one noticed.  Either that or they were too ashamed to show the proof: I also had had the numbers arranged to spell out the word “LOSER” upside-down (30% chance that that would hit the target).

            No, I have never played the lottery and I never will: I know too much.  It’s also illegal for me to play since I work for the organizers, so that’s that.  My advice, though, for those who love to gamble: save your money from the established systems (state lotteries, casinos, etc.) and only make bets that you know you will win, like betting that you will never make enough of the money that you really need.

            That’s an odds-on favorite.