Since the weekend, the media’s been full of stories about the two sets of EuroMillions Lottery winners, who both won £45.5 million pounds. It’s not something I’m massively interested in – fair enough, they’ve been lucky enough to win, and that’s great for them. I think if I were in a similar situation though, I’d be pretty certain to go for the “no publicity” bit – after all, I’m willing to bet that this publicity will generate loads of letters to them from people begging for help/loans/gifts/donations. That would do my head in straight away.
Actually, I don’t know that I’d actually want to win that much money. (Although of course I wouldn’t turn it down or anything!)
I would, of course, love to win a decent sum on a lottery – although even then I’d probably be just as happy to earn that amount if one (or more) of my business ideas or plans were ever to take off properly. But £45million? I don’t know. Personally I think that kind of money is too much, it’d just leave you reeling.
There are so many instances of people winning massive sums and then either just blowing it on stupid stuff (houses, cars, drugs) and ending up back to being broke with nothing to show for their win. Just about every “What happened next?” story about lottery winners describes the amount of begging letters from people, the family members coming out of the woodwork, and all the crap that goes with suddenly – and very publicly – getting a massive dollop of money.
And to be honest, I don’t think I would want that much stress and hassle in my life. Sure, the money makes up for it a bit, but I don’t know, it’s just not my thing really.
Yesterday was a very strange experience at work.
Having been a contractor for the best part of ten years, it’s the first time that I’ve been in the position of calling a couple of the agencies I’ve worked for, looking for a contractor, rather than for a new contract. It’s certainly been a learning experience, being on the other side of the coin.
The fact is, there’s more work at the new place than I can do on my own. We’ve already got one other person on board who works part-time, but we’ve got a couple of big projects that need completing ASAP. Given some time I could do them – but not both of them simultaneously. (Well, I could – but it’d involve some serious working hours to get both in place at the same time) I suspect I’ll still end up doing a lot of the work on both, but well, the company has agreed to looking for a contractor, so it’s worth a go. (And we’ll gloss over my current nagging suspicion that it’ll still be me ending up doing the work because they won’t want to pay the contract rates. We’ll see though.
But anyway, it’s still been interesting. We’ll see how it all develops, but it’s let me see the agencies in a bit of a different light too, which is never a bad thing.
