Taking chances

A lure came in the mail, not unlike the sweepstakes of yesteryear, to the addressee “or current resident” (somewhat insultingly). But here were three pull-tab tickets, tantalizingly hot-glued to a glossy flyer with images of cash and prizes and happy winners with big grins and even bigger novelty checks, the flyer gleaming on top of a daily pile of post.

Obviously this was no one’s first rodeo. But times are tough and everybody’s feeling the squeeze, so the slimmest of chances can inspire a swing for the fences. After pulling the tabs and reading print that gets finer every year, the odds that the three matching truck images and all-caps, red text that said “WINNER” would pay seemed to be about one in one and a half million. But as a very unwise Lloyd Christmas once exclaimed to an incredulous Mary Swanson: “you’re telling me there’s a chance?”

So on Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024, I kissed my wife for luck and drove to a nearby Chevrolet dealership, 99.9998% sure that I would never, ever receive the $10,000 that the flyer in my pocket suggested we had won.

Our 2010 Subaru Outback, cracked exhaust manifold and half-dollar-sized rust spots starting to show at the hips, immediately caught the eye (and ear) of a salesman waiting in the lot, shifting from foot to foot in the autumn wind.

She’s a little more loud and less to look at every passing year but the love you give is the love you get with the right, well-made vehicle and regular, attentive maintenance. Brian, let’s call him, could tell right away his work was cut out for him.

“Are you here for the event?” he asked.

The pull-tab tickets and flyers announced, it turned out, a sales event involving different vehicles, both automobile and financial, on offer to all residents for a week or so. Brian was a member of a nomadic squad of salespeople. He said his house was underwater somewhere down in Florida.

Hotels and short-term rentals in his local area are scarce and are going for around 300% the price that they had prior to the natural disaster, he told me, while I gave him the year, make, model and mileage of our household’s station wagon. We commiserated on the state of housing and predatory renting more generally—so much so that Brian didn’t seem too disappointed not to make a sale, in the end.

The operative portion of the fine print at the bottom of the flyer that the pull-tab ticket said explicitly must be brought with the ticket to the event for a chance to win, Brian was more than happy to point out, was roughly in the middle of a wall of sort of blurry, miniature text that was headache-inducing to peruse, Brian was more than happy to admit.

In addition to matching three symbols on the ticket, two additional codes, one on the ticket and another on the flyer, also needed to match winning numbers. The key phrase and punctuation in the fine print read something like “symbols/numbers/codes.” Brian explained which prizes remained and how everyone was guaranteed some prize, ranging from a nominal cash reward up to a special, grand prize of either multiple vehicles or $100,000.

He held his smartphone screen where we could both see it, hit a button that activated a slot-machine animation, and wished me luck. The animated reels stopped from left to right, one by one, all showing different symbols.

I wished Brian the best with his housing situation in Florida and left the dealership holding a $2 bill, perhaps not a big winner, but quite reaffirmed in my ability to calculate the odds on a gamble.