It's slowly dawning on me that a big part of bingo psychology is the constant turnover of lottery games, which in turn becomes the bane of the bingo volunteer's existence since many of the game names are embarrassing to say in mixed company. But we'll get to that in a minute.
The reason for the turnover isn't hard to discern - the average person won't win much and over time and they'll begin to develop a resistance, a prejudice, towards a particular game. But provide new, fresh games and hope springs eternal. This is sort of why some people will "reward" me by buying from me simply because I provided them a winner last time, or won't buy from me because I didn't.
Pat & Kim in the waning moments before 7pm, when bingo starts.
I found out tonight that cell phone companies charge you when
you take a picture and send it to your email account. This is,
of course, highway robbery and will make this picture among
the last I'll take with this fancy-schmancy but scam-laden cell phone.
Superstition is big in bingo. It's probably due to a blissful ignorance of basic statistics. Yet to play the lottery, says the writer Gabriel Zaid, "is an attempt to tune in to divine providence, to give God a chance to intervene in my life, to deny that success is due only to my effort, to pit grace against merit." (Quote is from Tony Cohan's wonderful On Mexican Time.)
So there were a lot of players pitting grace against merit out there tonight, but you should've seen coworker Kim's face fall when she heard she had to sell - get this - "Beat the Whammy". Where's the dignity? It sounded like a bad double-entendre.
Beaten down by having to yell "Beat the Whammy" every few seconds, we got a bit slap-happy. It's really hard to sound like an adult while saying any variation of "beat the whammy" and I won't even go into the vulgar motion I witnessed Kim doing. Pat, who has something like 29 ribs due to a freak of nature, told us that the extra ribs came in handy a few weeks ago when a beach umbrella uprooted in the Myrtle Beach wind and struck her in one of those extra ribs, leaving a bruise but no lasting injury.
Bingo players have a sort of innocence about them - you can't do too much wrong while playing bingo. You can't rob a bank or commit adultery, for example, especially if you're playing four or five cards at a time. If King David had been playing bingo (or at least fighting like kings were supposed to do in the spring) he'd never have had the opportunity to lust after Bathsheba. Well, maybe during the smoke break if she was there too. Although I have to say there aren't too many Bathshebas playing bingo.
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