Scratchofficus Waddicus
by James MacLaren
OK, so it’s common knowledge that people who play the lottery are dorks, yes? After all, the fucking thing is neither more nor less than a tax on the mathematically illiterate, right? And lord knows, with the “educational” system we’re saddled with, mathematical illiteracy is a fairly popular career choice.
But there are sublevels of dorkdom even among dorks.
And the biggest dorks of all gotta be the damn scratch off people.
Penny ante losers, without a life, taking up all of your damn time.
Fucking scratch off tickets are the biggest waste of time in the whole damn store. They’re a pain in the ass to get in the first place (later on some time we’ll do Can’tchoosicus) and an even bigger pain in the ass to redeem. The damnable things have a little bar code on the back and you’re supposed to stick that in a bar code reader and wait for the lotto machine to read it and then give you a little beep. Pray that dope who hands you his precious little ticket didn’t tear the thing right in half through the bar code or otherwise you’re gonna have to enter a sixty digit number and then wait around for an hour to see if you missed a keystroke or not. If so, it’s go back and do it again time. After you get your little beep then YOU gotta key in a three digit code (why they haven’t trained the machine to do this automatically I can’t imagine) which lives under that latex paint these fools seem to just LOVE spending endless hours of their lives scritching away at with a penny, or perhaps a fingernail. Lotta damn fiddling around with scratch off tickets. I hate ‘em with a passion.
Enter Waddicus.
Usually right around five PM when the whole world is careening through the store after work, grabbing beer, cigs, and all the rest of their prepackaged lives, stacking up in a line a dozen deep even when things are running smoothly.
Waddicus is an anal retentive bastard. Likes to hang on to stuff. Won’t let go.
And so, for reasons that will never become clear to anybody, Waddicus saves his little scraps of paper until there’s a stack of the damn things so thick that he’s gotta put a rubber band around it to keep it from turning into a cloud of confetti. When the rubber band starts acting like it’s gonna break, Waddicus decides it’s time to take his precious stash down to the Inconvenience Store and cash it in. The jerk.
Up to the counter, and stare at you with one eye crossed and the other focused on his pile of tickets.
Remember now, there’s a dozen people in line behind him, all in a hurry to get home to their drunken spouses and pitch right in to the beer, cigs, and TV. And more cars are pulling into the lot every second.
“I’d like to cash these in please.”
Like the “please” absolves him from his sins or something.
A groan from the line standers. Rolled eyes all around. Couple of nasty remarks, loud enough for Waddicus to hear. Waddicus knows well and good what a pain in the ass he is, but seems to think a half hearted little laugh will make everybody else jolly too.
He’s wrong.
They hate him.
But there’s nothing they can do.
And so, at the busiest hour of your miserable workday, you just put EVERYTHING on hold and start shoveling Waddicus’ little hoard of tickets into the lottery machine, one by one, waiting for that damn beep, keying in the three digit code (after having to scratch THAT thing yourself half the time to the sound of yet more half hearted laughter from Waddicus), waiting yet longer for the machine to print out a little slip informing you that Waddicus has won… YES, ANOTHER TICKET! …stapling the slip to the ticket, and then starting a pile of this shit that threatens to topple over, forcing you to pick all that shit off the floor and try again to keep the swarm of paper under control somehow. Phew!
People are starting to take their beer back to the cooler and depart the store with snarls on their lips. Some of ‘em just set the damn beer down on the floor and hit the road. Can you blame ‘em? Oh, probably, but there’s nothing in the world you can do about it. Folks from the gas pumps are waving ten dollar bills at you from over by the register that’s unmanned, in the futile hope that you’ll maybe let ‘em jump the line and get the hell out of there.
You continue with Waddicus’ fucked up pile of paper, exchanging knowing looks with the regulars who have faced up to the inevitable and are attempting to draw a little humor from the situation.
At last you’re done, and you can total up the number of free tickets and dollars and then ask Waddicus if he wants his money back as money.
And of course, being the complete idiot that he is, he gives every last dollar he’s won right back to the State, and asks for all of it in tickets.
We’ll cover the arcana of choosing tickets at a later time. This has already dragged on far FAR too long.
Waddicus lists out the door, and starts scritching and scratching at his brightly-colored paper right away. The dumb sonofabitch is lucky somebody didn’t throttle him then and there, but he remains blissfully unaware of it. You apologize to the line standers for causing them to wait still longer, as you return the orphaned beers to their proper places on the cooler shelving. You consider Waddicus outside the door, with thoughts of figuring out how to apply cyanide to scratch off tickets without killing yourself in the process. Waddicus scratches away.
Fuck off, asshole.
