You’ve always known you want to win the lottery, ever since you were a little girl. And why not? Almost every adult you’ve ever known has played the lottery and won, and all your friends plan on winning too, one day. As everyone knows, winning the lottery is a life-changing, transformational experience. People tell you it’s hard too. There’s a lot of admin involved. So much admin, in fact, that most people need to take a good chunk of time off work after a win, just to deal with it all. So you’re sensible. You wait, knowing it’s better to be settled before you start playing.
In the meantime, a few of your friends and a lot of your work colleagues have already played and won. You’re always excited for your lottery-winning friends and colleagues, buying them gifts and cards, decorating their desks. You happily cover your lottery-winning colleagues’ jobs while they’re on lottery leave. When they return from leave, winning the lottery is all they can talk about and they cover their desks with mementoes of their lottery wins. You don’t mind at all, but you’re looking forward to the day that you win the lottery too and can join in. You notice that the lottery-winners in both your personal and your work life have started to hang out together, and that sometimes they don’t include you. When you ask them why they say it’s nothing personal, that they want to spend time with friends who have shared the same transformational, lottery-winning experience as they have, and that you’ll understand one day, when you win the lottery too.
You start playing the lottery when you’re twenty-six years old. It’s a monthly draw, and each month you feel happy, excited and optimistic waiting for the results. You can’t believe you’re playing the lottery at last. It doesn’t really worry you when you don’t win for the first few months, or even for the first year. There’s plenty of time to win. It’s a thrill just to be playing. But then, after almost two years of playing the lottery, your marriage breaks down and, knowing how much stress and responsibility comes with a lottery win, you decide to suspend playing for a while, until you’re in a stable partnership again.
It takes five years for you to meet someone new. During this time, almost every friend you’ve ever had has won the lottery. And you’re happy for them, you really are. You still have hope. And you try not to let it bother you that you see them less and less. At work, it feels even more difficult. They’ve set up a newsletter to announce every time someone wins the lottery, which would be fine, but you also get emails from various sources, so you sometimes hear about the same lottery win three or four times, and it can feel a little overwhelming. Some of your colleagues have won the lottery on multiple occasions and you’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve covered people’s jobs for them while they’re on lottery leave. You get promoted to a managerial role and learn about
the special rules in place to support people who have won the lottery. You apply these rules diligently, because you would want the same support if you were to ever win the lottery. And now that you have a partner, to support you if you win, you’re playing the lottery again. Each month, you hope for that winning result, but it never comes.
People begin to ask you when you’re going to start playing the lottery, helpfully pointing out that there’s an age cut-off when you must stop playing. You can’t face telling them how many times you’ve played, how many months you’ve waited, hoping for a win, so you just smile and say nothing and help them sprinkle confetti and streamers on the desk of the latest colleague who’s off on lottery leave. People start to assume that you don’t even play the lottery, that you don’t even want to play, that you’re so focused on your career you couldn’t possibly consider taking lottery leave.
As a manager now, one of your responsibilities is to lead the celebrations for members of your team who have won the lottery and are taking their lottery leave. Traditionally, in the company that you work for, this involves you writing a funny, lottery related poem and reading it out in the open-plan office. It gets harder and harder to write these poems. The prospect of writing them, let alone reading them out without a tell-tale wobble in your voice, starts to play on your mind. Once or twice, you take a day off sick to avoid having to do it. When you’re in the office, all the conversation revolves around lottery wins. Sometimes, a lot of the conversation is people complaining about their lottery win, about how exhausting it is to have all this responsibility and all this admin to do, how nostalgic they feel for the good old days before they won the lottery and had more freedom. You think about telling them how many times you’ve played the lottery yourself, unsuccessfully, about how it doesn’t feel like freedom when you want to win so much but never do. You think about asking them why they don’t know how lucky they are, but you bite your tongue.
There is a flurry of work colleagues winning the lottery while, at the same time, all your friends from school have won at some time or another and you rarely see them now, so you have nobody to talk to, nobody who would understand how you feel. Some of your older colleagues won the lottery years ago, and set their winnings up as a trust, sort of a legal entity, and now these legal entities are also playing the lottery and winning. They tell you it’s even better and more life-affirming to have their legal entity win the lottery than when they first won the lottery themselves. You find yourself crying in the toilets at work, but you can’t really explain why. You keep playing, keep hoping, keep crying in the toilets. It seems like every single person you work with has won the lottery now.
You speak to your GP, try to explain to them how it feels to never win the lottery even though you’ve played for so long, and want to win so much. She tells you that she’s won the lottery several times and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s really hard work. You should, she tells you,
make the most of your freedom. Nevertheless, she signs you off work for a few months and prescribes you some antidepressants.
When you go back to work, your manager puts you on probation, citing the length of time you’ve had off sick and the impact this has had on your work colleagues. You don’t bother to point out that she’s been on lottery leave three times since you’ve worked with her, for a year each time, and that on two of these occasions you covered her job for no additional pay. You discover that four of the team you manage have recently won the lottery and are waiting for their wins to come through, while another has gone on lottery leave. You go to sit down on your favourite red office chair, but a colleague snatches it away, laughing. This is the special lottery-winning chair, they explain. Everyone who sits on it wins the lottery, so you’d better not, since you’re not a lottery player.
You work hard to support your colleagues dealing with their provisional lottery wins. They all need time off to do preparatory admin, which you grant in line with company policy, coming in early and staying late to cover for them. Some of your team who won the lottery several years ago are finding the additional admin and responsibility particularly challenging, and request changes to their working hours and patterns, all of which you agree to. You continue your regular probationary meetings with your own manager until she wins the lottery again, for the fourth time.
You decide to give up playing the lottery. It’s sixteen years since you first started playing. Technically, you have a few more years until the cut-off age, but you can’t take another month of hope followed by failure. You go to counselling. It takes a lot of work, but eventually you start to feel better. Your counsellor encourages you to identify some small benefits of life with no lottery win. You find this a challenge, as for years you would have happily taken on all the stress, responsibility and admin, for even just one lottery win. You still would. But, eventually, you do think of something. A lot of your colleagues need to do their lottery administration first thing in the morning, which means you get to work first and there’s always a parking space. It’s a tiny little win, but you hold onto it and when you’re at work surrounded by people alternately bragging and complaining about their lottery wins you just smile and think quietly to yourself, ah, but I always get a space in the car park.
Your colleagues who are lottery winners complain to senior management about the car park situation. It’s not fair, they argue, that by the time they get to work after having completed their daily lottery-related responsibilities, there are not enough spaces left. You can see their point and suggest reserving a few spaces in the car park for lottery winners. But management decides instead on a policy that means only lottery winners can use the car park and you must give up your space and come to work on the bus. Your tiny win is gone, lost. You know that you’ll never have the words
to express how worthless and insignificant this policy change makes you feel. That it’s not about whether you travel to work by car or bus, but about how you and your life are seen as having less value, just because you’ve never won the lottery. And even if you did have the words, you’d be accused of being bitter towards lottery winners, because you’ve never won, or perhaps they’ll assume you’ve never even played, so you stay silent.
You continue working with your counsellor to identify activities that will bring joy and meaning to your life and you identify a few, mostly creative, activities, that do make it worthwhile getting out of bed in the morning. You request to work reduced hours, so that you can create a better balance between work and your new activities. Your request is turned down, because you’re not a lottery winner, because you don’t have a lottery-winner’s huge array of responsibilities and, in any case, you have an important, managerial position and must be in the office full-time. You start looking around for other jobs, and when you find one – which is a lot less money but allows you to work part-time hours – you hand in your notice. During your last week, you do a handover with the colleague who’s taking on your role and discover she’s working the exact reduced hours you had requested, because she’s a lottery winner and needs the extra time for her admin duties.
You walk away, taking with you two decades’ worth of knowledge and experience, and you don’t look back.
Annie Kirby