Lucky

On Friday evening, I went with my girl to a local bar. We sat down and talked for a bit. She said that she was feeling lucky. No, not like that, you dirty devils. She had the feeling that she might win some moolah. She asked if I'd even done pulltabs before.

I said my friend, Shanon, did, but I had no idea how they worked. She said she very rarely played them, but would like to give it a shot that evening. She asked me to accompany her to the pulltab machine. She put twenty dollars into the receptacle, then had to decide if she wanted 1 or 2 dollar tabs. I told her to pick the 1's. The machine spit out 20 tickets. She gathered them together and we went back to our table.

She then dealt each of us 10 cards and we proceeded to play. She told me that if she won more than $50, she would split it with me. Cool! I wanted to take my time with them (maybe open one every 5 minutes or so), but she just ripped through 'em. All of hers came up dry as I continued opening mine. Damn, I really thought that her feeling lucky would get some type of win for us. Oh well. I only had a couple left. I tore one and noticed some marking on the bottom that wasn't on the others. It appeared that we had won a dollar. As Anakin Skywalker would say (in Episode I), "Yippee!"

My girl looked at the card and said she thought we had won more than that. I then noticed that there was a red line that went through all three "bars" on that same ticket (I hadn't seen it before). I turned the card over and it said that particular pattern was a $100 winner. Very nice! I asked her what the next step was. She said to go up to the bartender to collect her (our) winnings. She strode up there with quite a smile on her face.

The barkeep looked at her tic and did some paperwork for it. My babe looked back at me (still seated) and said she thinks it is actually a $200 winner. That would be sweet! From the table, I heard the bar boy giving her the money. 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100. Oh yeah! As promised, she gave me half ($100). She "invested" $20 and got $200 back (a 1,000 percent return!) We were both quite happy as we put the cash in our wallet/purse.

I said that if we did the same trick every weekend, eventually we would lose money (how else would the machine stay in business?) We won't make a habit of hitting the tabs regularly for this reason. As the night went on, about 5 people went to the tab machine to buy their own tickets. My girl commented that they most likely wouldn't win and, indeed, none of those patrons went up to the bar to claim any winnings that we saw. No, we were the fortunate ones that evening.

She felt lucky, acted upon it, and I got laid. No, I mean, she felt lucky, acted upon it, and because of that, we now have lots of cash money to take us through the rest of this month. High-five!!