Head Tale

Okay, maybe he wasn’t my childhood best friend but he was somebody from my hometown whose family and mine did do stuff together occasionally before they moved to BC.

But I should back-up…

I still distinctly remember a conversation when I worked for the Sask Publishers Group around 20 years ago when we were chatting with the staff of the Sask Writers Guild who we shared office space with.

Someone announced that a cousin of theirs had won one million dollars in the lottery and, in the course of the conversation, it came out that nobody in our group of ten or so knew anybody who had “hit the jackpot” to that level…ever.

I knew it theoretically but that was a real reminder that winning a lottery has incredible odds against and knowing that our group who worked with writers and publishers across Canada not to mention their own large circles of family, friends and acquaintances and yet no one knew anybody, even a friend of a friend, let alone a direct connection who had won a significant amount in the lottery until that day really brought home how rare big lottery wins were.

In the twenty years since, I still haven’t heard of anyone I know winning a big lottery and I don’t remember hearing of anyone I know who knew someone who won either, even on those rare occasions when a big win happens in Saskatchewan instead of the more typical Ontario or Quebec.

Well, my dad gave me some wild news the other day – the son of a family we’d known growing up recently won $55 million in the lottery!

I was pretty young when they lived in Indian Head and only have vague memories of them with their kids being quite a bit older than me – Scott who won the lottery was eight years older than me and I think he had one brother closer to my age maybe?  (Speaking of misremembering, I’m 90% sure that on one visit to their house I was scarred for life because one of the brothers had a poster of a crocodile coming out a toilet, possibly a band poster of some kind, in their bedroom!)

So, anyhow, like I said, he wasn’t really my childhood best friend but my dad and mom knew their family and dad remembered curling with Scott’s dad, socializing at their house, and even hauling dirt in from the farm for Scott’s dad to do some landscaping.

As is so easy in this day and age, when I heard the news, I went looking for Scott’s “Digital Footprints” to see if he was on Facebook or any other social media – more just out of interest rather than to ask for a million dollar loan (honest!) 😉

But it’s a sign of the times and it was quite obvious that there were a number of fake Facebook profiles which had popped up after he won trying to impersonate him and run scams to get people’s money.

So I guess I’ll just have to stick with my foggy memories of being at their house (I remembered where they lived in IH when dad told me so was old enough for that to stick) and of course, that crocodile poster!