The Mercury Retrograde Snafu

This is a rather embarrassing synchro since I’m an astrologer and a Gemini, ruled by Mercury, and should have paid closer attention!

Once a week or so, I buy a $1 Lotto scratch-off ticket. Numerous variations on these scratch-offs exist, but the idea with all of them is immediate gratification. You eagerly scratch off the appropriate areas and, depending on which ticket you bought, can win up to a cool million.The most I have won is $2.

But today I was out and about and bought one. I didn’t have a chance to scratch it off until I pulled into the Target parking lot. And then I sat there staring at the thing, at a pair of $1,000, and thought, Wait a minute. I just won a thousand bucks! How cool is that?

Excited about the win, I called Rob, then when I got home, read the direction on the back of the scratch off to find out how to redeem my thousand bucks. If you win less than $600, you take the ticket to a retailer – a convenience store, grocery store, wherever you bought the ticket – and they would pay you.

If you win more than $600, you can mail it to Lottery headquarters in Tallahassee with photographic ID and the appropriate paperwork and they would mail you a check within six weeks. Or, you can take it to a district office in various cities around the state, where you would fill out the paperwork that basically lets the IRS know you’ve won this money so they can tax you on it. Then they would issue you a check.

So Rob, our dog and I drove over to the district office in West Palm Beach. I was excited when I went inside and got into line behind an elderly black man, a white guy who had paperwork and his lottery card in hand. I looked around for stacks of the paperwork I was supposed to fill out, spotted some at a table, and sat down and filled it out.

When I returned to the line, I noticed that the white guy in front of me held a scratch- off with $10,000 written across the top of it He looked pretty happy, too, so I figured he had hit that jackpot. He handed in his paperwork and was asked to wait in the lobby for his check to be issued. And then it was my turn.

I got right up there to the window, handed over my ticket, paperwork, and driver’s license. At some point while I waited for the clerk to fill in forms on her end, it occurred to me that Mercury was still retrograde, and that there could be some snafu I hadn’t foreseen. Sure enough, about a minute later, the clerk glanced up at me, frowning. “Uh, ma’am, it says this isn’t a winning ticket.”

“What?”

Sure enough, to the immediate left of the scratch off area, the ticket read: Get three like PRIZE amounts and win that amount! The fine print. I had seen those two $1,000 amounts and had totally missed the fine print.

This is why astrologers advise people not so sign contracts during a Mercury retro and to always, always read the fine print!

It may be my most embarrassing Mercury retro ever. So the next day, I bought another $1 scratch-off, wondering what sort of Merc retro might happen, and burst out laughing. I won $1, the cost of the ticket. This one seems to have the trickster’s fingerprints all over it!