Ah, luck! That elusive phenomenon that money can’t buy and no one can ever count on to stick around. It shows up where it wants to, like in a simple mistake a convenience store worker made when selling a customer a scratch-off lottery ticket. That slip brought a $10 million jackpot to the lucky store patron’s doorstep.

Buffalo News has the story of a 53-year-old man who stopped by his local day-off haunt to buy the New York Lottery scratch-off tickets he always buys. So far, so normal.

But then the clerk accidentally picked up a more expensive $20 Win for Life Spectacular ticket, until the customer corrected him, got the tickets he wanted and left.

And so it began. He got in his truck and started scratching his tickets, triggering a string of fortunate picks from the luck gods.

“I kept winning on the scratch-off tickets,” he said yesterday at a news conference outside the store. “I won like seven in a row. I just got lucky, until I hit the big one.”

The “big one” in that case was a $25 win, so he decided to see just how far he could stretch his luck. With that ticket in hand he went back inside and splurged on the more expensive ticket the clerk had almost handed him.

“Give me that ticket you almost gave me by accident,” he remembers saying (and I hope he added “please”).

He stood in the store to scratch off the ticket, matching one of the winning numbers on the top with one he scratched off on the bottom. That winning 10 had the word “Life” underneath it that meant he had won $10 million, or $10,000 a week for life. Bingo. Or lotto — you get the point.

“I just sat there and couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Shocked. I probably looked over the ticket half a dozen times.”

The family has opted to divvy up the winnings between the parents ($300,000 or so after taxes, paid out over 19 years) and the children (another 7%). The ticket is in his name, but the lucky man’s family members can keep collecting on the win beyond his lifetime.

His family thinks luck is always with him in a very ah, special way.

“We’ve always had a joke that he had a horseshoe … ,” his daughter said, before realizing she was being recorded by media outlets, “somewhere on his body.”

Mistake leads Lancaster man to splurge on lottery ticket worth $10 million [Buffalo News]

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