My mom asked me to buy her a megamillions ticket, but the lady at the gas station refused to let me pick the numbers. I filled out the little card, she scanned it and then said I had to pick one of three random numbers I didn't ask for. Why? She didn't say. So I picked one, and she acted like I guessed wrong on a test and told me to pick one of four different numbers, again none of which I chose originally. I asked her what was going on, she wouldn't explain it to me. She started tapping randomly on her computer screen like someone pretending to press buttons in the background of a movie to look busy, I was holding up the line, so I left and went to a different gas station. That guy sold me a ticket, but he didn't let me choose any numbers, he just gave me a random one.
Okay, like, I get that the lottery is a scam, but if my mom's numbers end up winning I am going to go ballistic. A $2.00 idiot tax for the chance at hundreds of millions of dollars is worth it to me (jackpot is something like $1.5b, but Uncle Sam takes almost $900m right off the top, and when the jackpot is this high there are so many tickets sold that there are bound to be multiple winners, so you're looking to take home $100 to $200 million tops)
It's a big pipe dream anyway. I almost certainly wasted $2.00, but it will kill me if I lost out on the jackpot because every gas station attendant down here is a functional illiterate who's never used a computer before.