7-Eleven Clerk's Mistake Wins Man $380K

A KTLA reporter said in a news segment yesterday that the biggest mistake she's ever made at a 7-Eleven is coming out with nachos and a Slurpie at 2:20am—but she then (somewhat jealously) noted that that error didn't net her almost $400,000. Her envious reference: a 7-Eleven clerk in California who pressed the wrong button on a lottery-ticket dispenser, giving a 57-year-old regular not the tickets he wanted, but a huge windfall instead. Pat Tucker shows up like clockwork at a Burbank 7-Eleven twice a week to buy two Mega Millions tickets, per the Los Angeles Times. "That's his thing, that's what he does," the KTLA reporter says. But last week, clerk Manjit Singh pressed the wrong button, and the machine spit out a $2 Powerball ticket for Tucker instead.

Singh offered to void the sale, but Tucker decided to keep the ticket, and Singh's parting words to him were, "It's a lucky one." That statement turned out to be prescient: The numbers on Tucker's ticket ended up matching five of the six numbers in the Oct. 21 Powerball drawing (he missed only the Powerball number), winning him $380,774, per a California State Lottery press release. "It was a fluke I got the ticket; it was an accident that I won," Tucker says in the release. He says he wants to keep everything as normal as possible despite his newfound riches, telling lottery officials his only immediate plans are to renovate his home. And he's still buying lotto tickets from Singh's 7-Eleven. "He comes every day, and every morning, he's joking with us," Singh tells the Times. "He's a very friendly guy." (This Powerball winner made more drastic changes the second she realized her good fortune.)