Not $55 ... $55 million!
Couple ‘couldn’t believe our eyes’ as they kept counting zeros on Loto-Québec app
Nathalie Langlais was on her way home from work on Friday night when she saw a sign in her local dépanneur that caught her eye.
The jackpot for the Lotto Max draw that evening was $55 million, so she decided to try her luck.
Recently, Langlais has purchased lottery tickets only when the jackpot is large, and she often takes weeks to check whether she has won anything.
But the next morning, Langlais, 52, decided to check her ticket using the Loto-Québec app on her iPhone. She heard the music that’s played when you win money and initially thought she had won $55.
But then she counted the zeros and realized that she and her partner, Gilles Rosnen, had become multimillionaires overnight.
She raced upstairs to tell Rosnen, 46, handed him the phone and said: “Please tell me you see what I see.”
“I was thinking, what is going on?” Langlais said on Monday after collecting her cheque at LotoQuébec’s head office in downtown Montreal.
“We couldn’t believe our eyes.”
The couple got dressed and headed to the dépanneur to make sure they really were the winners.
Langlais handed her ticket to Mohamad Taher, who has owned a dépanneur on Marie-Anne St. for 23 years. When he placed the ticket in the Loto-Québec terminal, he heard music that indicates a ticketholder has won a big prize, but he didn’t know how much. Then the machine spat out a coupon telling him not to pay the client.
That’s when Taher discovered Langlais had won the jackpot and because she had purchased the winning ticket from him, he would receive $550,000 — one per cent of the prize money.
Langlais said Taher was thrilled with the news and gave her a kiss on the head to thank her.
The odds of winning Friday’s grand prize were 1 in 28.6 million, Loto-Québec said.
Taher told the Montreal Gazette that Loto- Québec customers have won $50,000 and $25,000 after buying tickets from him over the years, but no one has ever won anything close to $55 million. He said he will use his money to pay off his mortgage — he has too many responsibilities right now to take a vacation.
When the good news spread in the neighbourhood over the weekend, several customers dropped by to congratulate him.
When Langlais returned home after getting confirmation of her big win, she knew she couldn’t wait until Monday to contact officials at Loto-Québec. So after seeing a Loto-Québec spokesperson talking about the jackpot on television, she sent him a message on Twitter saying: “I think we are going to be seeing each other soon!”
Langlais said she spent the weekend informing her large family about the good news as well as Rosnen’s family in France.
She said she is thrilled that she will be able to help her siblings take early retirement. “I am from a large family from the Gaspé,” she told reporters. “My parents came to Montreal because they both had to work, and it will be nice to help people (her family members) who have worked hard all their lives.”
Langlais also made a phone call to her boss, but it wasn’t to say bye, bye — not yet anyway.
“But I told her that I wouldn’t be in on Monday,” she said. “I love my job and am very busy at work.”
She acknowledged that her big win will speed up her retirement plans and she hopes to do a lot of travelling, especially to India. She said she and Rosnen will take time to reflect on their future, but did say they would contribute money to cultural and social causes close to their hearts. “We have structured lives and commitments we have to keep,” she said.
Over the weekend, the couple chatted with their 14-year-old daughter about their good fortune and their daughter made sure her parents didn’t make any rash plans like booking a last-minute vacation.
“She said: ‘Remember, I have 35 days left of school and then I have my exams,’ ” Langlais recalled. “She kept us grounded. We have a simple relationship with money and I hope it stays that way.”