A Prince George man is $7 million richer after a joke intended to annoy his wife netted him a winning lottery ticket.
Michael Jansen is the winner of the B.C. Lottery Corporation's Daily Grand top prize. The Daily Grand offers winners a choice of either taking $1,000-a-day for the rest of their life or a lump-sum payout of $7 million. Jansen opted for the latter.
Jansen, who lives in the city with his wife Rose and their daughter, initially began buying the Daily Grand tickets a month ago as a joke to tease Rose.
"I'm always pulling pranks and cracking jokes, so naturally when I told my wife that I had won the lottery, she didn't believe me," he said. "Together, we must have checked the ticket a dozen times."
The two heard on the news that someone had won the prize in Prince George before they thought to look at their own ticket. As it turned out, Jansen matched five out of five numbers, including the one "Grand Number," earning him the top prize.
Jansen, who purchased the winning ticket during a visit to the Save-On-Foods at Parkwood Place, said he and his wife planned to take a long vacation to sunny regions in Australia and Europe.
But the two of them have no plans of moving their home base away in the north.
"We've been there forever. It's home, right?" Jansen said in a phone interview with the Citizen. "You can never really leave home."
Moments after Jansen received a symbolic cheque from a BCLC representative during a brief media event in Vancouver, he said he had no plans to leave his job as a construction surveyor.
"Not right now. I mean, I really love my job," he said. "I don't know yet. I'm not in any hurry to get back to work, let's put it that way."
