Mission Bay Bob Checks His Lotto

The Lotto desk is his permanent Location of Interest

We met Bob and Barb earlier in the week, battling taxes and covid restrictions and taking out their collective angst on generation x society.

Today, Bob needs to check his Lotto from Saturday night at the Paper Plus, Eastridge, something that usually takes .03s at the self check machine, or you could grab the numbers from The Herald and do it yourself.

There’s no way in hell Bob is going to use self-check anything. At his last visit to New World, his full-sized trolley had the following products:

• The New Zealand Herald Weekend Edition

• A six pack of fancy Feverfew and Despair tonic water for Barb

• A packet of QuikEZE

• A 6-pack of Paseo three-ply

With everything stacked in the bit where a baby sits, Bob could have had this transaction done and dusted in a microsecond.

But he’s paid his taxes: why not claim some of that back by getting the checkout girl to do some of the heavy lifting for once.

Once he’s swiped his Clubcard and collected the stickers for the cookware (he’s also got a request on Facebook for more), he’s off back to his brand-new Ford Mustang to drop off the booty, then like a very focused Olympic walker, he legs it to the bookstore to collect. It’s payday for Bob.

Standing in the queue, he questions the meaning of social distancing. When his daughters were young teenagers, he was constantly trying to get them to social distance from boys but they just wouldn’t listen to him. Now that exact same age group won’t stop bloody banging on about it.

Soon, it’s Bob’s turn. He unzips his clutch and takes out the paper tickets. There must be 15 of them in different lengths, depending on whether they are the Strike ones or the Powerball.

A small queue forms behind him, then slowly, a larger queue, with overheating preschoolers in amongst, but Bob, ever loyal to the New Zealand Lotteries Commission keeps handing over ticket after ticket and yapping tedious anecdotes to the poor school-aged kid who now has RSI.

My sister Janet won $7000 at the Riccarton Branch, that’s a lucky store but I don’t like the area much.

Fifteen minutes have passed and the scans are complete. Bob has won a total of $108.35. But instead of just pocketing the cash and fucking off, he’s keen to “reinvest”. Another 10 different tickets are purchased and only then is he sated. The only reason the queue behind him has dissipated is because people have died of heatstroke, waiting.

Off he drives (at an incredibly fucking irritating pace; if I drove that car I would redline it out of there) home to Barb who prepares them their afternoon tipple of gin and tonic; Bob a bit disgruntled as Barb puts mint in basically everything, but still, you’ve got to roll with a punch.

And now for some of ‘that’ Lydia Ko, she’s one of the talented ones.