Wins with The Big $10 Ticket scratch-off
She sorts mail every day for a living and sorts scratch-offs every weekend for fun, a Pasadena woman told Maryland Lottery officials. While her day job always delivers a paycheck, her visit to Lottery headquarters with a $10,000 winning scratch-off allows her now to say that her weekend pastime sometimes pays well, too.
Fortunately for the happy winner, she acted on a whim and bought her scratch-offs a day early.
“I was on my way home from work on Friday and saw a Lottery sign soutside a store,” said the 53-year-old Anne Arundel County resident. “I usually get a few tickets on Saturday, but, hey, I was right there. I figured, why wait?”
While expediency got her inside Arundel Liquors at 8530 Fort Smallwood Road, it was something else entirely that completed the lucky transaction. “I’d played The Big $10 Ticket before and hadn’t really enjoyed it, but as I was looking at the store’s selection, my eyes just kept coming back to it,” she said. “As silly as it sounds, it ‘spoke’ to me.”
Planning to complete her trip home before scratching her ticket, the lucky lady’s mind was changed by the cashier who suggested she play it immediately. “I wasn’t in that big of a hurry and, not having had much luck recently, I thought that changing my pattern might be a good idea,” she said. The next words out of her mouth there in the Pasadena store were, “Oh, my goodness!”
“Match after match, I just couldn’t believe it.” The more the corporate mail sorter scratched, the more she matched. She wound up with enough matches for the $10,000 win. “I called my husband right away,” she said. “I just couldn’t pull myself together I was so shocked. I thought he might have to come get me.”
The couple is a few weeks into a significant home improvement project and the budget was getting tight. Proceeds from The Big $10 Ticket win will see them through project completion with plenty to spare. Their $10,000 prize is the 18th awarded by the $10 game, which leaves 15 still unclaimed. The Big $10 Ticket game, which debuted in November, also has two unclaimed $100,000 top prizes and thousands of others ranging from $10 to $1,000.