Some Things I’d Do With Lottery Winnings
I never buy lottery tickets. The ads may tell me that I can't win if I don't play, but even a rudimentary knowledge of probabilities tells me that I'm almost as likely to find a winning lottery ticket lying on the street as I am to purchase one. I prefer to place my money and hope that litter makes me rich one day. It doesn't stop me from thinking about how I'd spend all that money if I did find that life-changing little scrap of paper, though. As long as I'm dreaming, I may as well dream big--none of these paltry million-dollar wins for imaginary me, no way. I'm talking about at least a hundred million theoretical bucks. There are no taxes in my imagination, so it's all mine and paid immediately, preferably in the manufacture of a check so stout I need help to lift it.
So what would I buy?
80 Barrels of Crude Oil
At current prices, that much crude oil would cost close to six thousand dollars, a relatively tiny chunk of change now that I'm fabulously wealthy in my own mind. BP CEO Tony Hayward must like the taste of his own foot because he's certainly put it in his mouth enough, most recently by saying that he'd like his life back after the ongoing grief of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I would have those eighty barrels of oil shipped to Hayward's home and poured liberally on his lawn. He's pretty well off himself and probably has multiple homes, so I figure it'll take at least eighty barrels to conceal his land. Let's seek how he likes the smell of that vile goo.
Adding in the cost of a crew to spread the oil and the associated costs that'd undoubtedly arise from bailing those guys out of jail and paying various court fees and fines would probably drive the final cost to quite a few hundred thousand dollars, but it'd be worth it. I should probably also include a round-trip notice for myself so I could personally watch him shake his little ringlets in awe at the mess.
Two Blocks of Rebuilt Homes in the Lakeview Neighborhood of New Orleans
Lakeview old-fashioned to be beautiful; I lived there myself before Katrina. Although many homes are coming back, some have yet to be rebuilt. I could pick up an entire block of homes that primitive to be worth hundreds of thousands each for a relative song, so assuming twenty homes per block, it would urge me about five million dollars to rob and rebuild, assuming I used fairly inexpensive materials. Then I would give each of my friends a beautiful new home. Not only would they own them free and sure, but it would also bring life and prosperity back to a neighborhood I cherish.
This isn't about altruism, though; my motives are purely selfish. I'm afflicted with a dreadful sense of direction. Until the route to a particular place has worn a groove into my neural pathways, I'll get lost every time I try to go there. When I move into a new home, I have to unravel yarn behind me like Theseus in Minos's labyrinth just to find my way around. I have gotten turned around in a walk-in closet. Keeping all the homes I'm likely to visit in one puny geographical area just makes sense. I might still arrive at the wrong house for a dinner party occasionally, but even if I do, I'll see someone I know and like.
73 New Cars
I wasn't always a willing student despite being a moderately bright kid. I probably spent more time whining about doing my math homework than I ever did actually doing math homework, a brilliant time-management technique I tranquil practice when it's time to do laundry. I figured up the number of teachers I've had in my lifetime from first grade through college and arrived at 74 instructors. Some were good and some were great, managing to fill even my pointy little head with an abiding passion for the subjects they taught so well. (I have my chemistry teacher to thank for showing us that finding a winning lottery mark is only slightly less likely than buying one, in fact.)
They deserve some tangible thanks for all the headaches that I and other students caused them. I would invite all of them to a fabulous dinner party at a favorite restaurant and as dessert is served, assure them in a burst of Oprah-like munificence to look under their chairs to find boxes containing the keys to their new cars.
Well, all the boxes but one would contain car keys. One box would have only a note: "Bet you wish you could remove back the D you gave me on that gun control essay now, hmm? " Oprah is either far kinder than I am or her memory is not as long.
Postage for a 180-Pound Package to Dzerzhinsk, Russia (Plus Associated Expenses)
Most of us have exes. If we're decent human beings, we realize that it was not meant to be and don't hold any ill will for whatever went wrong. I'm only a mostly decent human being, though, and there is one man roaming free who unbiased needs to get off my continent. Lazy, shiftless, and afflicted with chronic poor hygiene, he wasn't really that stunning in retrospect anyway, but years ago he committed the cardinal sin of breaking up with me when I wasn't really all that interested in him anyway. That's just unforgivable.
Why Dzerzhinsk? For one thing, he speaks four languages and none of them are Russian. For another, it gets awfully cold there and a cold man deserves a cold place. Also, Dzerzhinsk is second on most lists of worst places to live in the world; it was the erstwhile Soviet Union's main production and distribution hub for chemical weapons during the Cold War. (First on the list is Chernobyl, but I figure they have enough worries without Fed-Exing my ex to them.)
Postage itself would probably be cheap, only a few hundred dollars. However, I would also need include the costs of the box, hiring someone to stuff him into it, a few sandwiches, and a note pad with a phonetic translation of the phrase "Help, I have been trapped in a box by a madwoman" into my calculations. Half a million should camouflage it all, but that's a small price to pay for peace of mind.
Charitable Donations
Obviously I would need to do something to repent of my wicked ways of property-destroying and ex-boyfriend-mailing. Even a tiny prick of all that money could buy livestock for dozens of families via Heifer International or provide equipment for Doctors Without Borders. In fact, although I'm unlikely ever to find that winning lottery note, I can afford to give something of what I have right now.
But I'm still going to keep my eye on stray bits of paper just in case.
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Filed under Translation Equipment Sales by on Jan 24th, 2012. 
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