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Restaurant Staff Buys Winning $900 Million Powerball Ticket for the Wrong Day

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Hear that? It's the crushing agony of defeat.

Grissini

Powerball is on the tip of everyone's tongue right now, with the current jackpot of the nationwide lottery currently standing at a staggering $1 billion. While the average person is actually 246 times more likely to be struck by lightning than actually win the jackpot, it's still fun to dream — unless, of course, you're one of the New Jersey restaurant employees who mistakenly thought they won over the weekend.

According to NBC New York, staff at Grissini, an Italian restaurant in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., purchased Powerball tickets for last Saturday's drawing for an office pool, when the jackpot was an only slightly less impressive sum of $900 million. The staff gathered around as one worker read off the winning numbers — 2, 11, 47, 62, 63, 17 — erupting into screams of joy when it was a perfect match for their ticket.

One even reportedly quit his job after realizing he was about to be a multimillionaire. But what the poor employees didn't realize was that they in fact were referencing the winning numbers from Wednesday's $528 million drawing, for which no winning tickets were sold.

$900 million sure would be nice, but so would a recent prize offered by the California state lottery: An 18-course dinner at Thomas Keller's vaunted fine-dining destination The French Laundry. And even if your ticket turns out to be a loser, everyone who plays a particular scratch-off in New Hampshire is a winner, because the ticket itself has a scratch-and-sniff bacon aroma.

Watch the workers freak out when they think they've struck gold, below:


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