That's A Lotto Bitchin'

What’s worse than making a mistake and getting bitched at?

Getting bitched at for something that you have NO CONTROL OVER.

I got into work at 2 on that particular Tuesday. Boss’ wife was there, and while April still had her truck in the parking lot, I saw no sign of her. I step behind the counter, sign in, then turn towards the registers to chat with boss’ wife, as there were no customers in the store at that time. That’s when I saw it...

Our state lottery machine staring back at us with a blue screen full of error messages.

“What’s this?” I ask, thinking it’s something being resolved.

Boss’ wife doesn’t know. The machine was like that when she got in. Neither of us have any idea how to fix it. And so the barrage begins.

Our lotto machine has two basic functions that most people want from it: selling tickets for the random number games (state lotto, megamillions, stuff like that) and validating winning tickets (both scratch-offs and the ones the machine prints out). It could do neither of these things. The only lotto-related business we could do was selling scratch-off tickets. We could not sell other tickets, we could not validate anything, and we could not tell you what the winning numbers for ANY previous times were.

The night goes on. People come in wanting print out tickets. People want to validate winners, or check their tickets. It goes on. And on. And on.

At one point, a man came in to validate a winning ticket that I sold him.

Me: Sorry, sir. Our machine is currently broken, and cannot validate any tickets.

Grump: Well you should have told me that before you sold me the damn thing!

Me, Boss’ Wife, Jane: ....O_o; was... was he joking, or just a douche?

Another customer came in to play his weekly lottery game, and upon finding out that our machine was broken, stormed out in a huff. And another man nearly broke the machine MORE, demanding that we take it apart and clean it. The issue was that the comm link was down (which I TOLD him), not that there was dust in it. When I refused to take the machine apart, he REACHED OVER THE COUNTER AND DID IT HIMSELF. I mean, what the hell?

If customers were polite about it, I would tell them that our nearby competitor had a working lottery machine. But if they were douchebags, I just let them leave in a huff.

The good news is that the lottery sent a tech out that night, and he got the machine up and running again... an hour before close. But at least it works again.

Also when I was closing my drawer, I looked at the few validations we HAD done, and discovered that the last one was given at 9AM. I’m honestly surprised that the state let their precious lottery machine be out of order for (at most) 11 hours.