Not My Lucky Day

There are bad days, there are really bad days, and then there's this day. The kind of day that should have been the luckiest one of your life, except for one little problem that makes all the good luck you should be having mean nothing at all. Maybe your usual numbers won on the week you agreed to stop throwing your money away on lottery tickets. Maybe the Publisher's Clearinghouse letter you threw away really was worth a million dollars. Maybe, on the first day of your new diet, the kid who was right behind you in the 7-11 finds a golden ticket in his candy bar.

In most cases, nobody actually gets hurt, but Lady Luck will rub your nose in all the good fortune you'd have had if something else had gone differently.


 * The Simpsons: The dog needs an expensive operation, so the family cuts back on luxuries. This includes Lisa's monthly encyclopedia purchase--which happens to cover Copernicus, which turns out to be the subject for that week's report in school--Marge's weekly lottery ticket--so of course Marge's numbers come up right on cue--and new clothes for baby Maggie...who chooses just this week to have a growth spurt.
 * Hey Arnold!: Oskar Kokoshka is usually bad at poker, but today he's so confident of his current poker hand, he's betting the baby he's babysitting... but his poker partners won't allow it, and leave. And it turns out to be a royal flush.
 * The Proud Family: Dejenay wants to buy a soda because of a $50000 instant win sweepstakes going on. Penny Proud gives her a reason not to: "It's the difference between watching a movie, and watching Leave It To Beaver, without the sound." And it turns out that the bottle Dejenay was going to buy contained a $50k prize.
 * The Jamie Foxx Show: Some hotelier lady won't let some worker at the hotel buy his regular lottery numbers. And it turns that no one won... and that the "asinine" winning numbers of 1-2-3-4-5, were that worker's usual numbers (Not really asinine, as statistically speaking, any sequence of numbers is exactly as likely as any other.)
 * It is more likely someone else will pick those numbers.
 * The Bill: Everyone thinks Reg Hollis has won the lottery because his numbers have all come up, and it turns out for some reason that he changed one of them. The result of this is that he gets hosed down in a cell and the fact that 5 numbers (in most case) still gets a substantial prize between them is completely ignored.
 * This may be based on the story of a woman who found that her lottery ticket almost, but not quite, won a fairly minor prize-a couple thousand dollars at most. Disappointed, she alters it (badly) with a ballpoint pen, and attempts to redeem her prize. Naturally, the clerk doesn't buy it and she's arrested. The officer finds the original number under the forgery, and discovers that the woman was double retarded-not only did she get arrested over a relatively small sum, she invalidated a ticket that had won the jackpot.
 * Hanging With Mr Cooper and Webster both had plotlines where someone buys a lottery ticket with their age as one of the numbers (so they think), and everyone thinks that the someone has won the jackpot... until it's discovered that the character fibbed about their age when buying the ticket. D'oh! (Once again, the "5 numbers out of 6 is still worth a lot of cash" angle is ignored.)
 * A different kind is portrayed in the first episode (and opening titles) of My Name Is Earl: Earl wins at scratch cards, but while he's celebrating, he gets rammed by a car.
 * This is supposed to be the event that convinced Earl of the existence of karma, and that he needs to atone for all the bad things he's done up until now so that nice things can start happening to him again.
 * Minor subversion: On an episode of Nurses, the nurses' lottery ticket numbers are drawn -- but the person who bought the ticket got one of the numbers wrong. But this time, they actually _do_ realize that 5 of 6 numbers wins them a good deal of money, after the Aesop on how they really do care about the person who screwed up.
 * In the ABC Columbo episode "Death Hits the Jackpot", A young man in the final stages of a divorce wins the jackpot and asks his Uncle (Rip Torn) to cash in the ticket and hold the money for him so he won't have to split it with his soon-to-be ex-wife. Naturally his Uncle kills him. A VERY bad day indeed.
 * One episode of Everybody Hates Chris has Chris going to buy a lottery ticket for his dad, but he decides to spend the money on something else instead. Naturally, that's the day his dad's numbers turn out to win.
 * Expand the window to three days and you have the nijyuu hibakusha, people who managed to be in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs went off.
 * Almost every episode of Married With Children.
 * The first half of the Scrubs episode "My Butterfly" has everything going wrong for the characters, resulting in a patient dying on the operating table. The second half replays the day with everything going right ... and then the patient dies anyway.
 * Several of the events in Alanis Morissette's Isn't It Ironic?, such as the man who wins the lottery then dies the next day, and the free ride when you've already paid.