Life Is A Lottery

[SIRandyraven]

We live in Switzerland and thus buy uk lotto tickets that span 8 weeks when we visit uk.
On holiday in Cornwall and pop into Truro Sainsburys and have with me a few lotto tickets to be checked for winners.
Two people manning lotto checkout ' booth and Sainsburys male assistant takes my tickets to till and scans them. I hear the machine bleep and print out something and he shouts across , you have won two lucky dips , Wednesday or Saturday. I call back Wednesday please and he then hands me lotto tickets.
As I leave I think hold on, I'm sure I had a £25 win and it was on my birthday. I check on phone lotto application and my regular two lines I have played since lotto started show a win of £25 on my birthday.
I return to till and question the ticket scan he did. I ask to see my losing tickets , that he has chucked in the bin having torn them up without asking me.
So I stand my ground and female assistant starts to empty bin and piece together all the old torn tickets. After 30 minutes my tickets that supposedly lost are not in the bin. They check till and not in there either. Female assistant now goes to sescurity to review video. While she is gone chap who checked ticket keeps telling me he knows they were losers blah blah.
Anyway while we wait for her to return, I then check all the weeks results on phone app and discover two more £25 wins so they owe me £75.
Anyway we agree that video shows him chucking tickets in bin ...but where are they ?
So we leave and also leave my mobile number and if they find till up £75 at end of shift they will call me. 30 minutes later mobile rings and guess what ?
They have by a miracle now found my so called losing ticket and owe me £75.
So we return to Truro Sainsburys store and manager gives me money owed and a cock and ball story of how the tickets were in till , but he missed the display saying it owed us £75 because the lucky dip win display over wrote it ...err yes right.
So be warned folks always check tickets yourself.
If it was not for me remembering winning £25 on my birthday and thinking if only it was the big one, I would have taken his word for the win and left their till £75 up :-]
I told manager I was very annoyed and he gave us a £25 Sainsburys gift card as hush money lol

[SIRandyraven]

Hi Captain - I should have at the time to be honest. I was on way to Falmouth when they called to say they had found the ticket.
The female skating as wonderful. She never doubted my word at my time and went through all the hassle of checking context of bin.
When we retuned we had to go to customer services and wait for manager who had the £75 in lotto till in a plastic transparent change bag.
He said when it prints the little ticket to say you had win money, it the. Prints ticket to say lucky dip win also and one ticket obliterates the other ?
So all he saw was the lucky dip win indication ?
I had to suck it in and take his word for it.
I said it was crap I had to drive back and he said here is a £25 voucher for your time and fuel. I could have told him my real hourly rate in Switzerland lol

[SIRandyraven]

Autocorrect kidnapped my reply ...but you can guess what I mean.

[Hypognosis]

@SIRandyRaven

I would like to see you pass that "ticket overwrite" story to Lotto HQ as, if real, it is a technical fault which could be diddling thousands of players every week.

I don't buy tickets very often and, because it's on impulse, I go for lucky dips. So I'm not "emotionally attached" to any specific numbers and do not know them by heart. I don't watch the draw programs, don't use any phone app and am thus disconnected from the fact of whether my ticket has won. I am entirely dependent on the till operator to tell me, win or lose. It wasn't worth its own thread but, one time, I handed over the ticket, the assistant stepped sideways to the terminal, tucked behind something which meant I could not see any display for myself.

You mentioned a beep or ta-daa noise and I can no longer recall if there was one but I still felt something untoward was going on as there was a lot of arm movement before turning in such a way that I could see him tearing *a* ticket to pieces and immediately binning the pieces, as he said "sorry, no win".

Not having kept a record of my numbers, I had a sudden wish to have my ticket back, so I could check website/red button etc just to satisfy myself that this was true but it was too late. Petrol tills, didn't want to make a fuss.

Why *do* they insist on tearing up non-winning tickets? *Nothing* can go wrong if they are left intact. That was the thing that made me suspicious.

It occurred to me that opening with the words "can you check this for me, to see if it's won", flags the till operator that you don't already know and have not come with prior expectation of a payout: therefore prime target for the switcheroo trick if it is a winner. Keep a known dud ticket on hand, for ripping up.