10/12/1999

Boy did I not want to go back to work this morning. Long weekends always do that to me, and to add to it, Fred and I took Friday off, so it was a 4-day weekend for us. I got into work around 7:45, and found piles of mail on my chair, and two messages from a Racquel in Puerto Rico. Racquel was desperate to place an order for the telnet client program our company sells. I finally got ahold of her mid-morning (today was a holiday in Puerto Rico; betcha didn’t know that), got the credit card number and all pertinent information, HUNG UP WITHOUT RUNNING THE CREDIT CARD, and when I did so, the card was declined. It was really kind of an all-day ordeal, the whole Racquel situation.

It makes me really tense to talk to someone who has a thick accent. I have to really work to understand them, and I don’t want to have to ask them to repeat themselves, because it seems rude. "Excuse me, could you repeat that? My delicate American ears could not understand your loathsome, thick, non-American accent." Not that that’s what I’m thinking. I’m not.

Work went by quickly, especially after my 11:00 dash to Wal-Mart to pick up a bag of Gummy Savers. My current candy addiction, and the grocery store doesn’t carry them.

So if you don’t live in Alabama, chances are that you didn’t know there was a statewide vote on the lottery today. Lots of people want the lottery, and the bible-bangers are up in arms, shrieking hysterically about the lottery being the downfall of civilization as we know it. Personally, I’d like to have the lottery. When I lived in Maine, they had the Megabucks lottery. Match 8 numbers, you win the jackpot. One week the jackpot was up to $8 million. I matched 7 numbers and won $1,000. One more number… It actually took me 2 days to realize how close I’d come to seeing the big bucks, I was so happy to have won the $1,000.

Like I said, I’d really like to have the lottery in Alabama, and if it passes (as I expect it to) I’ll probably buy 2 tickets a week. But you know what? The greatest thing about the lottery isn’t the winning. I don’t expect to ever win the lottery; no sane person does. The thing that’s so great is that those tickets allow you the luxury of a few hours of fantasizing about what you’d do with all that money.

Me, I’d quit my job. I just have no patience for Grandma who wins the $50 gazillion lottery and continues to work every day from 6 to 2 at the gas station and doesn’t move out of her trailer. Idiocy, that. I also have no patience for those who wail and sob that the lottery will lead to widespread poverty. People who spend money they can’t afford on lottery tickets and scratch-off tickets deserve no sympathy.

Yeah. I’m a bitch.

Nighty-night.

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