A Busselton great-grandfather was so busy caring for his elderly mother that he almost missed the phone call telling him he had won more than $650,000 in Lotto.<\/p>\n
The man, in his 70s, was one of 10 division one winners across Australia in the Saturday Lotto draw on August 22 \u2014 but did not discover his life-changing win for more than two weeks.<\/p>\n
He had been ignoring calls from an unfamiliar number before finally answering one from Lotterywest.<\/p>\n
But even then, the full-time carer was too busy looking after his mother to properly take in what he was being told.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d been dodging calls from a number I didn\u2019t recognise for a couple of weeks,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen when Lotterywest finally got through to me, I fobbed them off because I was busy with Mum and wasn\u2019t really listening to what they were saying.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe caller asked me to call them back and I promptly forgot about it!\u201d<\/p>\n
When Lotterywest eventually got through again, the reality of his win began to sink in.<\/p>\n
The winner, who bought a $6.60 System 7 ticket online, had used birthday numbers to land a total of $652,714, including other division prizes.<\/p>\n
But he has kept the news largely under wraps.<\/p>\n
His 91-year-old mother is the only family member who knows \u2014 and the pair are planning to celebrate with a Chinese takeaway.<\/p>\n
\u201cMum loves Chinese takeout,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe also regularly have five-generations family days, so I\u2019ll shout everyone to a Chinese meal and share the news with them all then.\u201d<\/p>\n
The winning numbers were 9, 11, 2, 1, 13 and 20, with supplementary numbers 28 and 45.<\/p>\n
Lotterywest spokeswoman Jennie Fitzhardinge said the winner\u2019s reliance on birthdays was common among players choosing their own numbers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe often see more division one winners when lower numbers are drawn because so many players choose birthdays and other significant dates,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
There were three division one winners in WA from the draw.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Busselton great-grandfather was so busy caring for his elderly mother that he almost missed the phone call…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92416,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[227,13284,335],"class_list":["post-92415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-perth","tag-lifestyle","tag-lotto","tag-perth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}