A Canadian woman from a small farming town was in disbelief when she learned last month that a lottery ticket she bought while grocery shopping was worth a whopping $50 million ($37.6 million USD).
"For my family, it's going to help them out a lot," Lois Olson, 80, told the CBC. "For me, I'm too old for this. I would have liked to have won this 20 or 30 years ago."
Olsen lives in Irma, Alberta, a town with fewer than 500 residents, according to the Edmonton Journal.
"To give an idea of the scale … Olsen's winnings are about 38 times the yearly revenue of her town and 40 times its annual expenses," the newspaper reported.
Olsen bought a Lotto Max ticket on Nov. 11 at a co-op in Irma. The next day she returned to the store to check her numbers on a self-checking machine. She ended up calling a woman over to help her because she thought the machine might be broken.
"I put my ticket in, and pulled it out, and it looked like $50," she told the CBC. "I pulled it out and put it back in, and it looked like $500. Pulled it out and put it back in, and told the girl, 'I think there's something wrong with this machine. She comes around the corner and says, 'No, you just won $50 million."
For weeks after that, she did her best to stay anonymous – although word traveled fast in Irma. She picked up her winnings Tuesday.
"Money doesn't mean a whole bunch to me," she told the Journal, adding that she plans to spend some of the money on her four children, nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. "I had hard times … maybe not now so much."
Some of the money will also go toward buying herself a new SUV to replace her 11-year-old car and, she said, perhaps toward a trip to Ireland.
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