Unclaimed lottery winnings spur mad search

I am a lottery kind of guy.

Some dismiss buying lottery tickets as a useless, reckless exercise designed to fail. But I consider it long-term, financial planning for emergencies like retirement, Christmas and birthdays.

Every Wednesday and Saturday night, I place my graying locks on the pillow and pre-dream about what I am going to do with my Powerball, Megabucks or Paycheck winnings. What a wonderful way to drift off.

That’s what the dollar is for.

I plan my purchases of a high-speed BMW that will make Besaw sob, my house in southern France, and my oceanfront condo on Sanibel Island. I even plan my trip to Augusta and the motel where I will hole up, awaiting my riches when the Lottery Commission opens the next morning. I will have the strawberry pancakes at the esteemed Augusta House of Pancakes to start the celebration.

Let’s see.

I believe the lottery has been in Maine for about 25 years, or 1,300 weeks. Since that date, I would estimate, very conservatively, that I have spent $4 a week, or $5,200 since its inception. I have won $1,000 on Megabucks and $50 on some scratch ticket, which I had to pay immediately to Terrance Fitzpatrick, on some Red Sox-Yankees bet. That’s a deficit of $4,150.

That’s not counting the kids’ birthdays when I shower them with $1 scratch tickets for each and every year of their lives. Never, if memory serves, has the winning amount ever topped the age. But it’s the idea that it could pay off $250,000 or so, you know?

But each and every ticket I ever bought was checked on the day of the announced winners, well, maybe on the day after if I was lost in Maine’s North Woods. If I am outside of Maine, I buy lottery tickets in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Georgia, South Carolina, and of course Florida where the lottery starts at $3 million and jumps to $6 million a week, if there are no winners.

I invented sloth. I am an Olympic-level couch potato, born to nap. I have two broken vacuums and don’t care. I have snowdrifts in my driveway that would daunt the Iditarod.

But even I check my lottery tickets each and every week. The older I get, the more I think that the only thing that will keep the lovely Blue Eyes around for another calendar year is a massive lottery win, say $30 million.

So why, I ask, can USA Today report that a half a billion (that’s with a “b”) dollars in lottery tickets went unclaimed just last year? There are dozens (dozens!) of million-dollar prizes and hundreds (hundreds!) of prizes worth a mere $100,000.

In January, a $1.5 million lottery ticket expired in Minnesota (never been there). In June, a $7.5 million ticket expired in Oregon (not in 30 years). On Christmas Eve, a $3 million lottery ticket will expire in Florida. I have been searching suitcases, back seats and front seats and under the beds, looking for that one. In 2003, Florida had a $30 million jackpot unclaimed.

I know that one was mine.

“It could have been a visitor who came for a vacation and left … or the ticket could have gone through the wash,” said Florida Lottery spokesman Alfred Bea.

Come on. Who doesn’t check a $30 million lottery ticket?

Don’t trust those machines. I think Gary Fowlie, proprietor of Fowlie’s Overpriced Emporium, has gotten rich on my winners after his machines have said “loser.”

Dawn Nettles, editor of the Lotto Report, blames those machines for unclaimed prizes. “It’s so frustrating that I can hardly talk about it,” she said. One computer scan failed to validate a $267 million winner in Ohio in 2006, when the computer ink was not read correctly. Luckily, the ticket was validated in other ways.

Scratch tickets are so complicated that winning tickets are often discarded in the trash, Nettles said. (I know I can’t figure them out.)

Rushi and Amid Patel, who run the Ocean Breeze Liquor and Pub store in Jensen Beach, Fla., are praying that the $3 million winning lottery ticket they sold shows up before the Dec. 24 deadline. They will get $7,500 for selling the ticket.

Now, I have never been to Jensen Beach. I don’t even know where it is. But I am searching every inch of Cobb Manor and the Cobb Manor fleet, to see whether that missing ticket is there.

Hey. I am $4,150 behind.

Christmas is coming.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.