What's New On These Pages: April 2006

Next month: May 2006

• Monday 24th April
  Got a letter today from Camelot's lawyers (David Keltie Associates), which was sent to the old Connect Internet Solutions Limited work address that's been wrong since February 2005 - well done, guys. It wanted an overlong disclaimer put on the home page of this site, but I didn't like that taking up so much space. I've put a one-liner on there instead (with a link to a long version), despite the fact that clicking the logo at the top of the page has gone to a disclaimer page for years now and, er, it's taken Camelot's lawyers 11.5 years to complain!

• Saturday 22nd April
  Bought two more tickets (online) for next Wednesday's main Lotto rollover draw.

• Saturday 15th April
  The full results for last night's Euro Millions were very slow to emerge - took until about 10.45pm for the Portuguese site to display them and after 11.00pm until Camelot bothered, so I ended up having to phone their customer number this morning to get the number of UK winners and that's when the "fun" began...

  I phoned on the dot at 9.00am and I was surprised to find out that the woman answering had the number of UK winners in front of her already (it can't have been from a previous caller since I was surely the first to ask anyone at Camelot about the number of UK winners). She started reading them off and all was going swimmingly until, er, she finished at the 3+2 tier and didn't carry on!

  In case you're wondering, the most tiers of UK winners figures that are "easily" available are the top 3 - teletext has them and so does Camelot's winning numbers phone line service. Usually, if you talk to a human on the Camelot phone line, they don't have the info at all (yes, bizarre) and have to wander off and get a bit of paper from their manager with the figures on (ho hum, hi-tech!).

  Anyway, I asked for the 3+1 tiers (and below) UK winners figures and the woman put me on hold for a couple of minutes whilst she scampered off. She duly came back and started reading the figures to me...56,696 then 86,170...er, what? Yep, it looks like her manager told her to read them off the Website, which now has a column - courtesy of their Website redesign a few weeks ago - dubiously labelled "No of winners" making it difficult to work out if that's UK-only winners or European winners. Sure enough, Camelot's phone line staff (including the manager!) don't realise it's European winners, so as I type this, I'm still waiting for 3+1 downwards...I'll phone them back again shortly and see if they can tell the difference between their backside and their elbow yet.

  What's most perplexing is why the Camelot phone line staff have been given UK winners info on 7 of the 12 prize tiers - I can understand 0, 3 or 12 tiers being known, but 7? The woman claimed that the rest (8-12) were "lower" tiers, but I'd probably class lower tiers as 4-12 (since for last night, tier 3 was £300,820.50 and tier 4 was only £3,803.00). The bizarre world of Camelot and their phone line staff, eh?

  Turns out the "7 of 12" list was actually an internal Camelot e-mail sent by some manager and I did eventually coax out the full list of my second phone call them. Of more interest was the new Dream Number game the woman told me about and the fact that Lotto Extra is to be scrapped (lovely!). I've now put up a new page about the game.

  Note that the press mentioned the new game in early February 2006, but they had virtually no details about it and certainly didn't know that Lotto Extra was due to be scrapped, so it looks like I've got a Web exclusive here.

Previous month: March 2006

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