There are bad days, there are
really bad days, and then there's this day. The kind of day that
should have been the luckiest one of your life, except for one little problem that makes all the good luck you should be having mean nothing at all. Maybe your usual numbers won on the week you agreed to stop throwing your money away on lottery tickets. Maybe the Publisher's Clearinghouse letter you threw away really
was worth a million dollars. Maybe, on the first day of your new diet, the kid who was right behind you in the 7-11 finds a golden ticket in his candy bar.
In most cases, nobody actually gets hurt, but Lady Luck
will rub your nose in all the good fortune you'd have had if something else had gone differently.
Examples:
- The Simpsons: The dog needs an expensive operation, so the family cuts back on luxuries. This includes Lisa's monthly encyclopedia purchase (which happens to cover Copernicus, which turns out to be the subject for that week's report in school) and Marge's weekly lottery ticket (so of course Marge's numbers come up right on cue). (Also new clothes for baby Maggie, who chooses just this week to have a growth spurt.)
- Hey Arnold!: Oskar Kokoshka is usually bad at poker, but today he's so confident of his current poker hand, he's betting the baby he's babysitting... but his poker partners won't allow it, and leave. And it turns out to be a royal flush.
- The Proud Family: Dejenay wants to buy a soda because of a $50000 instant win sweepstakes going on. Penny Proud gives her a reason not to: "It's the difference between watching a movie, and watching Leave It To Beaver, without the sound." And it turns out that the bottle Dejenay was going to buy contained a $50k prize.
- The Jamie Foxx Show: Some hotelier lady won't let some worker at the hotel buy his regular lottery numbers. And it turns that no one won... and that the "asinine" winning numbers of 1-2-3-4-5, were that worker's usual numbers (Not really asinine, as statistically speaking, any sequence of numbers is exactly as likely as any other.)
- The Bill: Everyone thinks Reg Hollis has won the lottery because his numbers have all come up, and it turns out for some reason that he changed one of them. The result of this is that he gets hosed down in a cell and the fact that 5 numbers (in most case) still gets a substantial prize between them is completely ignored.
- This may be based on the story of a woman who found that her lottery ticket almost, but not quite, won a fairly minor prize-a couple thousand dollars at most. Disappointed, she alters it (badly) with a ballpoint pen, and attempts to redeem her prize. Naturally, the clerk doesn't buy it and she's arrested. The officer finds the original number under the forgery, and discovers that the woman was double retarded-not only did she get arrested over a relatively small sum, she invalidated a ticket that had won the jackpot.
- Hangin With Mr Cooper and Webster both had plotlines where someone buys a lottery ticket with their age as one of the numbers (so they think), and everyone thinks that the someone has won the jackpot... until it's discovered that the character fibbed about their age when buying the ticket. D'oh! (Once again, the "5 numbers out of 6 is still worth a lot of cash" angle is ignored.)
- A different kind is portrayed in the first episode (and opening titles) of My Name Is Earl: Earl wins at scratch cards, but while he's celebrating, he gets rammed by a car.
- This is supposed to be the event that convinced Earl of the existence of karma, and that he needs to atone for all the bad things he's done up until now so that nice things can start happening to him again.
- Minor subversion: On an episode of Nurses, the nurses' lottery ticket numbers are drawn — but the person who bought the ticket got one of the numbers wrong. But this time, they actually _do_ realize that 5 of 6 numbers wins them a good deal of money, after the Aesop on how they really do care about the person who screwed up.
