Description 13 Billion To One by Randy Rush
A Riveting Story About Grit, Determination and the Refusal to Give In or Give Up — No Matter How Great the Odds.My brain froze as I counted the zeros flashing across
Canada’s lottery-ticket scanner screen.
knew seven was a lot. But between the sudden shockandadrenalinerush,Iwashavingahardtimeremembering just how many zeros constituted a million dollars.
The words “You’ve Won” ricocheted through my body as I stared at the screen, counting and recounting the zeros lined up next to a dollar sign and the number five.
Seven zeros. Eight numbers including the number five. Was it really telling me I had just won FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS?
I could hear my heart pounding as I rescanned the lottery ticket. I knew this had to be a malfunction, some sort of scanner error. But when I scanned the ticket a second time, the same eight numbers appeared with the “You’ve Won” message.
“Filina, I think I’ve won fifty million dollars!” I heard myself screaming to the store clerk, the only other person around. “Seriously. I think I’ve WON!”
Rocket fuel shot through me, propelling my body toward the front of the small, corner grocery store. I locked the door and flipped the Open sign to Closed. Then I was back at the checkout counter, shoving the ticket in front of her.
I heard her breath catch as she took in the numbers and compared them with the winning numbers from the Lotto Max drawing two weeks earlier. Unbeknownst to me, a single ticket holder had won the jackpot on January 16, but the winner had yet to come forward.
“Oh my gosh, Randy, you’ve won!” Filina exclaimed. “You’ve hit the jackpot!”
Now we were both screaming, and I was on such a high I was having a hard time controlling my body. Sheer excitement sent me flying up and down the aisle, shouting, skipping, jumping. Then I was back at the counter.
“What do I do?”
Every nerve in my body was tingling. My cells were on fire and my hands were trembling. I had trouble breathing.
“You’ve got to sign it,” Filina said, pushing a pen toward me. “That way, no one can take it from you.”
I grabbed the pen, scribbled my name on the signature line, and felt sick.
“Oh, no,” I yelled. “I signed Randy Rush and my legal name is Randall Rush. What if that invalidates it?”
In my forty-eight years on the planet, I’d had enough life experience to know that if something could go wrong, it WOULD go wrong. And I was holding a cardboard piece of paper representing fifty million reasons for things to go terribly wrong.
Filina, who had calmed down by now and taken charge of the situation, assured me I would be fine. She asked if she could run my ticket on her scanner behind the checkout counter to see if the Big Winner red flashing light and siren would go off. Within seconds, the siren sounded and the red light began flashing. It was like we were at a carnival.
We both let out another celebratory scream. Once again, I was bouncing from one end of the corner grocery store to the next. I knew this had to be a dream, but it felt so real I didn’t want to wake up.
“What do I do now?”
I had never hyperventilated before, but given my rapid breathing and raging heartbeat, I was sure that was what was happening.
“Now we’ve got to phone it in,” she replied.
I struggled to control my breathing and keep my feet pinned to the ground as I listened to her dial the number to the Lottery Call Center in Winnipeg and calmly explain that she was calling from Lamont Grocery to report a $50 million jackpot winner.
After a minute, she turned the phone receiver over to me. “Good afternoon, sir,” a woman’s voice said.
“Congratulations.”
I could feel my throat muscles constricting and heard Filina’s voice urging me to breathe as the call center operator began rattling off a series of verification questions. She asked me my name, where I lived, and when and where I had purchased the ticket. She also had me read the security number off the ticket and then put me on hold so she could run some security checks on her end—including viewing surveillance video—to corroborate the information I’d provided.
“Just breathe,” Filina instructed again as I clung to the phone, waiting for the security checks to be completed. “It’s going to be fine.”
After three or four minutes that lasted an eternity, the woman’s voice was back.
“You are now the registered winner,” she announced. “It’s official.”
She told me the next step was to report with my ticket to the Western Canada lottery commission office in St. Albert, located about ten minutes north of Edmonton, on Monday morning.
“Congratulations,” she repeated before ending the call.
I handed the phone receiver back to Filina. I was so revved up I couldn’t speak. I locked my eyes on the checkout counter, trying to steady myself and process what was happening. That’s when I noticed the stack of premium, soft-serve cat food cans I had placed there a few minutes earlier and remembered why I had ventured out into two and a half feet of snow and -22°C temperatures in the first place: My cat, Conway Kitty, was out of soft cat food.
It was a typical frigid winter Saturday in Lamont, a sleepy suburb located about forty miles from Edmonton. I had slept in late and enjoyed a lazy morning puttering around my house with a large mug of coffee. But by early afternoon, Conway’s angry meows and deadly glares had escalated to the point they could no longer be ignored.
“Okay, I’m going,” I growled back at my twenty-seven- pound cat.
I reluctantly pulled on my snow boots, threw on my parka, and grabbed my truck keys to make the half-mile drive to the corner grocery. As I was heading out the door, I noticed a stack of lottery tickets I had accumulated and grabbed those, too, figuring I would check them while at the store.
That was less than an hour ago. But now it seemed like another lifetime.
I was still so high on endorphins it was hard to think straight. But as I paid for the cat food, paranoia swept through me.
What was I going to do between now and Monday morning?
I was holding a lottery ticket worth $50 million. FIFTY
MILLION DOLLARS! Lamont was a small town and word always spread fast. What if someone tried to steal it from me?
My thoughts ping-ponged from one horrifying scenario to the next. Some of them ended violently, and all of them ended with my $50 million lottery ticket being peeled out of my hand.
As it now stood, Filina was the only person in town who knew about the win. And I had to keep it that way.
“Promise me you’ll say nothing to anyone until Monday morning,” I said, my voice half demanding, half pleading. “If you do that, I’ll come back and compensate you generously.”
I could see the surprise on Filina’s face. She was a good person, and I knew from our past conversations that she had a hard life.
“Randy, I promise I won’t say a word,” she assured me. She paused for a minute before continuing.
“The only thing I want is a small trailer to put on my parents’ property so I have a place to live,” she said. “I’m staying with them so I can take care of them, but there’s not enough room for me.”
“Done,” I replied.
I left the store, waded through the snow back to my work pickup truck, climbed in, and quickly locked the door. It was so cold I could see my breath, but I was on such a high I couldn’t feel anything but my heart pounding against my chest.
I turned my key in the ignition and cranked up the heat, but I was too amped up to drive. My body was buzzing with electricity and the sound of a voice that grew louder with each word. “You’ve just won fifty million dollars!” it boomed. “You are LOADED!”
13 Billion To One: A Memoir: Winning the $50 Million Lottery Has Its Price by Randy Rush
Guest Review by Katy
A memoir about sudden fortune and the sudden loss that followed, '13 Billion to One: A Memoir,' by Randy Rush is the absolutely fascinating story of a man who won $50 million in the Canadian lottery one day and lost a good portion of it just as quickly.
Randy Rush was, at one point, a perfectly normal guy. In fact, the only reason that he found out that he won the lottery on the day that he did was because he stopped into his local general store to pick up cat food. As fate would have it, one of the lottery tickets that Randy had bought before that turned out to be the jackpot winner.
It's an unattainable dream that most of us wish for. What would you do if you won the lottery? For Randy, the answer was similar to what many of us would say. He wanted to pay off his friend's debts, donate to his local church, and quit his draining job. Randy is a conscientious man, and not the type to immediately blow all of his winnings on hot tubs and jet skis. But even conscientious and careful people can be scammed. Unfortunately, the son of a family friend asked Randy to invest in his tech start-up and things went downhill from there.
The company turned out to be a scam, and Randy loses almost $5 million to a man that he'd previously thought of as a friend. Not one to take things lying down, Randy decides to begin a crusade not only against his scammer, but against white collar scammers everywhere.
The glamorous thought of winning the lottery is part of what makes this memoir an interesting read, but not all of it. Randy Rush seems like a very moral guy in his own right and the last person I would ever have expected to get scammed out of such a large sum of money. This one has a great ending and I highly recommend picking it up for yourself!
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