It’s official: lottery players are often REALLY dumb

This cheered me up a bit today after feeling thoroughly rubbish all day: Camelot have had to withdraw some scratch cards because some punters are too dumb to understand negative numbers. When told that to win you have to reveal a number (a temperature) lower than one printed on the card, some consumers were outraged that they were told that they hadn’t won when they scratched off a -6 when the number they had to get lower than was -8.

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I’m not having it." said one mentally challenged woman from the Manchester area. "I think Camelot are giving people the wrong impression – the card doesn’t say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number. Six is a lower number than 8. Imagine how many people have been misled."

If all it takes to be ‘misled’ is to have a total lack of primary school level numeracy, it’s a wonder these people can tie their shoes in the morning – but I guess that’s why slip-ons were invented.

Posted on November 8, 2007 by . This entry was posted in Comedy. Bookmark the permalink.
  • http://blog.ciarang.com Ciaran

    Thanks for the chuckle. They wouldn’t be buying a scratch card in the first place if they weren’t mathematically challenged though would they?

  • http://www.Marcus.GurXite.de Marcus

    This is … weird! Guess my little cousin would have known better.

  • Pingback: Marcus bloggt » Lotteriespieler sind … anders!

  • Nico de Poel

    These kinds of things often make me wonder how us humans manage to keep society running.

  • http://www.kieransenior.co.uk Kezzer

    Haha, I love that last quote about slip-ons XD

    It is quite scary, yes!

  • Asi

    Yes, Steve, please keep making fun of our good ol’ US of A while posting local stories like this! :)

  • Kentamanos

    I guess they need to print a “number line” on the cards for reference purposes :) .

  • Kencho

    Yup, maybe something like -10

  • Kencho

    Duh, why has this deleted the rest of the post? :’(

  • jomunoz

    really funny.

  • http://stodge.blogspot.com Stodge

    Sad but true; the education system was going downhill when I left school. We were the first year to do GCSEs.

  • Dan

    Am I the only one that thinks using negative numbers(even for temperature) in a lottery a bit out of the ordinary? Doesn’t excuse the poor math skills of the consumer mind you, but it is a bit unorthodox, no? I don’t know, just seems like someone at Camelot could have seen this coming.

  • http://andrewfenn.blogspot.com Andrew Fenn

    “However, because of the potential for player confusion we have decided to withdraw the game.”

    Another victory for the consumer… As a 23 year old I now want to kill myself.