EDITORIAL: It's best not to take Mega Millions too seriously

Jul. 29—"Well, I strolled down to the corner, gave my numbers to the clerk/The pot's 11 million, so I called in sick to work."

WE hope none of you followed the example of the personae from Mary Chapin Carpenter's 1992 hit country song , "I Feel Lucky," and burned a paid-time-off day in anticipation of winning the Mega Millions' billion-dollar jackpot.

There's a 302,575,349 out of 302,575,350 chance that it didn't work out.

By now — we wrote this more than 10 hours before last night's 11 p.m. draw — most of you know the fate of your $2 investments.

It's possible that a few people are still holding "Schrödinger's" lottery tickets, which, like the famous scientific cat, are simultaneously winners and losers until someone checks them.

Whenever a lottery game threatens to set a record — last night's draw was the Mega Millions' third-ever billion-plus jackpot — we turn our attention to the game of chance.

Jackpots like these always spawn heartwarming tales where a group of friends or co-workers pool their money and go in to buy a massive amount of tickets go lessen the odds — instead of a 1-in-302,575,350 chance of winning, spending $100 for 50 tickets would have improved your odds to 1-in 6,051,519.

And this time is no different. CNN reported Tuesday that Todd Graves, founder of the Raising Cane's fried chicken restaurant chain, spent approximately $100,000 to buy Mega Millions tickets for each of the chain's 50,000 employees.

While that's generous, it might be ill-advised with widespread worker shortages. Presumably, the first thing a Raising Cain's employee would do after winning $850 million — the amount of Tuesday's Mega Millions draw — would be quit their job at Raising Cain's.

But nobody won Tuesday, setting the stage for Friday's $1 billion-plus draw.

If you bought a ticket for that drawing, take some comfort that it was a rational thing to do. With the chance of winning at 1-in-302,575,350 and the potential payoff of a $2 ticket at more than 500 million-to-1, the potential reward is better than the odds.

By contrast, the Pennsylvania Lottery Pick 3, formerly the Daily Number, pays off at 500-to-1 with odds of 1,000-to-one.

And there's additional comfort the non-winners can take, through the cautionary tale of Jack Whittaker, who won a then-record $315 million Powerball jackpot on Christmas night 2002. He would later say the lottery windfall destroyed his life.

His marriage ended in divorce. Someone stole a briefcase, containing more than $100,000 from his car while it was parked outside a strip club. He died in 2020 at the age of 72, with his survivors fighting over the diminished jackpot.

Even though $1 billion is a serious amount of money, we shouldn't take the lottery too seriously.

In that spirit, we'll wrap this up the way we started, with a word from Mary Chapin Carpenter:

"Now 11 million later I was sitting at the bar/Bought the house a double and the waitress a new car/Dwight Yoakam's in the corner, trying to catch my eye/Lyle Lovett's right beside him, with his hand up on my thigh/Moral of the story, simple but it's true/The stars might lie but the numbers never do."