Aurora Starchild
This is the best-case scenario for an office white elephant gift circle. A Kentucky woman was given a winning $175,000 lottery ticket at an office party. It was just enough to pay her family’s loan debts but not enough for her to retire. Win-win.
Videos by Rare
Lori Janes is an office manager and treatment coordinator at Harmon Dental Center. At a holiday office party on December 13, she took part in a white elephant gift exchange. Every participant was required to give a gift worth $25 or less.
The Louisville resident initially chose a $25 TJ Maxx gift card, but another participant took it from her. So, she went with $25 worth of scratch-off tickets.
From TJ Maxx Gift Card to $175,000 Lottery Ticket — The Best Office Party Ever?
“Once it got to me, it was done and mine to keep. That’s when everyone was telling me to scratch them off,” Janes said in a Kentucky Lottery press release.
To everyone’s shock, Lori Janes had not just one but two winning tickets. The first was worth $50 — which would have been pretty cool on its own. But then she discovered that another was worth a whopping $175,000.
“Everyone was going insane,” said Janes. “People were getting their calculators out and double checking. A couple of people even scanned the ticket on the lottery’s app, just to make sure… I couldn’t believe it. It was a twenty-five-dollar gift exchange, and I won one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars!”
After taxes, Janes brought home $124,250 from the $175,000 lottery ticket from the office party.
“This is so crazy. I’m truly blessed,” Lori Janes told lottery officials. She revealed that she would use her winnings to pay off her daughter’s student loans as well as their cars.
Lori Janes’ big surprise came after scratching off a win in all 15 spots on one $10 Hit The Jackpot ticket. The odds of winning the $175,000 jackpot are 1 in 1.08 million.
The Kentucky Lottery also presented Sunrise Market in Fisherville, Kentucky, with a $1,750 bonus for selling the winning ticket. And, thanks to Lori Janes’ debt, Harmon Dental Center isn’t sweating the possibility of their employee retiring to the tropics. Everyone wins.
