It just wouldn’t be a Tuesday if I couldn’t turn a relatively trivial matter into a major personal dilemma wrought with social and moral implications!
Our office Secret Santa is tomorrow afternoon. When signing up to participate, people had to include several gift ideas that they would like. Fair enough, and saves people from having to deal with yet another Starbucks holiday mug. Our gift exchange only has a $15 limit – we are all poor – and names were drawn out of hat, so away we go. Should be simple. Buy a gift based on the person’s suggestions and is within the dollar limit, and the festivities will practically create themselves.
Naturally, I have to turn this entire thing into a massive drama bomb: the person I picked has requested $15 worth of lottery tickets.
I hate lottery tickets. I don’t have issues with gambling or games of chance or this particular person, but I HATE lottery tickets. My mother abused them (and through the tickets, me) while I was growing up, and to this day the lottery and all things associated with it fill me with rage. Ed doesn’t bother telling me when he buys the occasional ticket, I sneer at people standing in line to get their bi-weekly fix, and the entire thing just makes me incredibly cranky all over. I want to punch Shirley Jackson. The music that the lotto machines play makes me sick to my stomach. I have a difficult time not strangling my mother when she tells me long involved stories about how close her numbers were. I resent the fuck out of being asked to “pray to daddy so we hit the big one” in every conversation I have with her. People who animatedly and repeatedly discuss what they would do if they won the lottery disgust me. I HATE LOTTERIES.
The whole thing is fucking ridiculous, and now I’m being forced to buy a whole crapload of tickets as a “gift”. This makes me angry and resentful. It does not fill me with holiday cheer; it reminds me that lottery numbers were more important to my mother than I was for many, many years and it brings back a flood of very bad memories. I regret taking part in the gift exchange if this is my only option, and it’s too late to do anything about it now.
Don’t wanna.
Fuck the lottery.
delicious juice dot com 
i would take the mug over the lottery “taxation for the poor” tickets.
You should cut those memory strings causing you so much angst. Instead, consider it as a choice between some material goods cranked out in China by someone who does not get to “share the xmas spirit”, and the chance to support whatever cause you wish.
There’s the local church-sponsored lottery tickets for many good causes, and the winner gets a loaf of bread or some cookies or something.
There’s this :
http://www.vancouver2010.com/olympic-news/british-columbia-lottery-corporation-launches-sportsfunder-lottery-to-support-amateur-sport-in-bc_35630YO.html
But some tickets for a social cause you can support, for a non-monetary win, would both bug the heck out of your luckaphillic coworker surround by little angels listening to every prayer, and might bring you some happiness, instead of bad memories.
Sports make me angry too – why don’t the arts get lottery money? They need it more than sports teams do. :)
Oh, this answer was too easy, but it’s over your $15 limit :
http://www.vancouveropera.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=88&Itemid=99
and we know you don’t hate opera.
Sports make you angry? Playing with balls makes you angry? Perhaps you are confusing organized sports with what kids do for fun.
The answer is out there, just don’t go through the government tax scheme to get to it. Maybe the Winnipeg Opera Society is giving away a Mazda, tickets only $5.
Ken, interesting suggestions – although, well, the government uses lotto money for good too, eh? Though charities are a bit more transparent, it’s true!
But the real problem is the gambling aspect, tho. Lotto tickets might not have the panache of poker, get called “the stupid tax,” etc, whereas poker is all badass… but to people who have impulse-control problems and an inability to stop partaking in risk-taking behaviours, to the point of spending all their money and emotional time on something… lotto tickets are just as bad as slot machines. Those people are addicts, and that’s where the bee is in this particular bonnet. It might not seem serious ’cause it’s something you can buy at the corner store, but still. And it’s true that most people who buy lotto tickets are NOT addicts, but I could see how having an alcoholic parent might make you not ever want to go into a liquor store again in your life… for example.
I don’t have a point, really, except that maybe giving a gift certificate for a store that sells lotto tickets among other things might be a way to get out of having to buy the things directly, and you can at least hope that some of the money will get spent on gas or chocolate bars instead…
(I participated in a lotto once, when I worked at a gas station – it was totally bizarre, filling out numbers on little cards and then putting it into a machine and then gathering around the draw like we were Neanderthals and it was the first fire we’d ever seen… very spooky and off-putting. Although Keno was sort of fun, once I figured out the odds – about two tickets in – it stopped being fun so fast you could hear the screeching tires in my brain. Eugh. I have zero understanding for what people get out of it. Give me a chocolate bar ANY DAY.)
Ditto on the chocolate. Don’t support any church with your money, either. They give “playing with balls” a whole different meaning. What, too soon? Oh, wait, it’s never too soon.
I assume this person only gave one suggestion? What a jerk. Just give them a nice box of Thomas Haas chocolates and be done with it. :)
Sports are like STD’s, I’ve no use for them and will avoid them at all costs but I feel no enmity for those who can’t seem to manage without them. It’s not worth being judgmental about. I feel pretty much the same way about gambling though I do buy my wife a dollar scratch-off ticket once in a while. Here’s how you handle the gambler. Buy a dollar scratch-off ticket and gift wrap $14 worth of chocolate. Then give him/her a choice of the lottery ticket or the wrapped package. So you get off for a dollar if this is a truly stupid person; otherwise you didn’t feed their habit and you can give the dollar ticket to your spouse. Everybody wins.
I ignored the list entirely, and ended up getting my giftee something for him specifically. None of my money went to the BCLC!