Every once in a blue moon Herself wants to play the lottery.

Normally she is fairly sensible and I would even stretch to describing her as quite smart, but she does have one little flaw – she is numerically illiterate. She openly admits this herself and says that anything to do with numbers just confuses her.

So each time the subject of the lottery comes up we have our little “debate” about the laws of chance.

I point out that she has a better chance of being run down by the 15 bus, and she points out she doesn’t even know where the 15 bus runs so there’s no chance of that, to which I reply “precisely”.

“But someone has to win it?”

I point out that this isn’t necessarily true as it frequently rolls over to the next draw, but assuming there is a winner then the chances of it being our ticket are less than one in ten million. This little nugget of information is lost though because of her lack of numeracy. I explain it in another way, in that we would have to buy nearly eleven million tickets to be guaranteed a win. She points out that anyone who does win hasn’t bought eleven million tickets. There’s no answer to that.

Yesterday I gave up. Why not throw our money away? We might even get the odd tenner back. I went into the Irish lottery site.

“Welcome, you’re 3 minutes away from making magic happen!” the page declares.

I entered the details. I gave it my name address, post code, gender, date of birth, email and I made up a decent password.

“Password must be less than 12 characters” it replies.

I put in a shorter password.

“Password must contain letters and numbers only“

My password only contains letters and numbers so this is a bit odd. I put in a different password. At this point I am about twenty minutes from my promised magic. I click the submit button.

It comes back with a server error and a little apology. Maybe I would like to try that again?

I fill in all the details again, I am very careful to make sure there are no mistakes.

“Your username/email address or password is incorrect.” What the fuck?

I try logging in on the assumption that my registration worked.

“Your username/email address or password is incorrect.” Sigh! I am now well over an hour from making magic. I went into Password Recovery. I entered my email address and answered a security question.

“Your username/email address or security is incorrect.”

At this point it is way beyond a challenge. This fucking web site doesn’t like me but that’s nothing compared to my hatred for it. I am determined to crack it, not out of desperation to waste my money on the lottery but out of sheer determination to get the fucking site to bend to my will.

I tried with a completely different ego, with a different name and email and all that. I entered the details with great care and precision.

“Your username/email address or password is incorrect.”

Fuck!

I’ll try again another day……