I’m in a lottery pool with a couple of family members.
Nothing much, just an arrangement where we each spend $5 a week on some flavour of lottery and we send the numbers to each other to be all above-board, and we roll small wins back into more tickets but we’ve agreed to evenly split any decent amount of cash we may get.
Normally I get my lottery tickets from a friend’s convenience store in the lobby of the building where I work. But with everything everywhere locked down and everyone at home, that routine I’ve had for the last couple of years, or so, is gone (along with every other daily/weekly routine for me and everyone else). So my lottery ticket buying game has been pretty shoddy of late.
I recently heard that the OLG (Ontario Lottery and Gaming corporation) has made it possible to buy lottery tickets online. Given how relatively rarely I’m out of the house these days, let alone anywhere that sells lottery tickets, buying tickets from the comfort of my recliner struck me as a good time to try out this newfangled approach.
I figured, even with my laptop battery getting toward the low end of things, I could sign up and buy in and just get a screen grab of the numbers I end up getting and could forward them in a decent-looking email attachment to the poolies, and we’re all good.
Well…
Signing up to play online takes a few more steps than even someone pretty well versed in signing up on websites is used to. Legal issues, and such. I verify I’m old enough to play, etc.
Then once you’re finally past that, there’s the issue of the float. It seems that they want you to have a balance with them which your playing is then subtracted from. Perhaps it’s got something to do with a built-in wakeup call to give people a poke if they’ve been spending more than they think they have? “Hey, your balance is at zero again, so you can’t play any more.” Which maybe is supposed to sober people up so they stop themselves? Although honestly I’m not sure why addicts, etc., wouldn’t just tack more onto their float and keep playing, if that’s what the monkey on their back demands…
Anyway, I tried to skip that step and just get right to the ticket buying as a one-shot thing, but while I could order up exactly the ticket and extras I wanted on it, I couldn’t buy it because, of course, my balance was empty. So back I go to that extra part of this process.
It turns out they needed a minimum of $15 as a starting balance. I’m not sure why, given they have lottery games as cheap as $1 to play (and I think maybe even 50 cents? That used to be the case until recently, anyway.) But there you have it. And I could either pay with a credit card that I believe they’d keep on file (pass), or via a one-time Interac payment through the bank. Score! So I did that, logged into the bank, approved the transfer, and it all worked out. It put me back onto the OLG page where I was, but my ticket was nowhere to be found. So I punched up another one, double-checked that I was only getting dinged for the one purchase and not for the original one as well, and put the charge through.
As expected, it showed me my purchase with the numbers and draw date, etc. So that all took entirely too long but now all I had to do was get a screen grab of it and email it away as proof of my weekly purchase for the pool.
But wait… I’ve been using the Mac so often these days that I’m used to just being able to use the key command to get the crosshairs on-screen that allow you to get precisely the part of the screen you want to capture as an image file. On a PC it’s a more cumbersome process of hitting the Print Screen button (which grabs an image of the entire screen), calling up a program like Paint or something, pasting the image into the program, then using the program to trim down the image to what you want it to contain and then saving it.
So I got the screen cap and then… wait… with some poking around, I realize that the newer version of Windows I have doesn’t have Paint? Or at least, if it does, I can’t find it anywhere. But I need some kind of imaging program–or at least a notepad app? Maybe that would work?–in order to dump this image in order to trim it down.
I can’t find anything that’ll do the trick.
Then I remembered that I’d been intending to install GIMP (a free and open source imaging program that does much of what (the very pricey) Photoshop does) onto my Mac to try out as an alternative to the old version of Photoshop I use. I figure, why not do the same on my PC laptop? That would be of use later on, plus right here and now, it would let me get this stupid image of the screen in and cut down and saved.
I start the download.
And it takes… a while. Such is the perception, anyway, for someone who’s probably too used these days to just being able to grab an app for his phone and have it downloaded in under a minute. Maybe longer if it’s a really chunky game, or something. So yeah, this thing was taking its sweet time.
Meanwhile, I’m watching the fullness meter in my laptop battery inch down. (To clarify here, the way we have our charging station area set up on a shelf, I can’t have the laptop plugged in but open/usable. It’s either charging but closed or open but unplugged.)
The download continues.
Then I get a warning from my laptop battery: Down to 10% charge.
I know from way too much experience that I’ll get one more warning that it’s down to 7% and then, because that’s a filthy goddamn lie, within a minute or maybe two it’ll just shut down completely. So this is getting tight.
The file finally finished downloading, but as anyone familiar with computers knows, that’s not the program itself. Dear me, no, what you’ve got yourself there is the smaller program that will install the bigger, full program.
It occurs to me at this point, and not for the first time, that had I put on my shoes and just walked to the nearest store that sells lottery tickets, it would almost definitely have been faster than all of this has taken.
I mean, yes, going out needlessly and COVID-19 and exposure to people, etc., and actually doing that just for lottery tickets would’ve been dumb… but the point is that I’m often acutely aware of how much time is being drained from my life by certain things–I will usually do whatever is the quickest way to accomplish what I need to do, or to get me where I need to arrive–and this whole process is proving needlessly lengthy.
So I click on that file to open it. Installation expanderization! Go go go!
And that thing craaawls along as it’s finally installing the program that I needed quickly in the first place.
I figure, you know what? It’s not gonna make it. I’ve got to cut bait on this whole plan and just get back to the OLG screen and take a photo of the ticket info–it’ll look like hell but the draw is tonight, so it’ll have to do this time–and I’ll be done with it.
So I click on the tab that’s still open for OLG.
Which, if you know my luck with these things and cared to place a surefire bet, tells me it timed out from inactivity and logged me out.
I log back in.
The laptop tells me that it’s down to 7% power.
I look around on this unfamiliar landing page for where my ticket is. I finally locate it under one of the numerous drop menus, call up the info, square it on the screen, grab my phone to take a picture–man, this is going to look like crap–make sure everything needed is in the frame on the phone and–
The laptop dies.
No screen grab, no terrible photo… I’ve got nothing.
So I’m here to say to my fellow poolies: I’ll now have that ticket image sent to you in a couple of minutes. I just had to fire up the Mac to relay yet another tale of my technological woes first.