Lotto’s ‘Green Machines’ Churn Out a Few Problems
Kim Kyne felt a lot better about the whole thing on Wednesday. Her “green machine” was working again.
On Tuesday, the day the California Lottery launched Lotto--its legalized version of the old numbers game--Kyne, who is the customer service manager at an Alpha Beta market in El Monte, had tried to do her part.
“I did everything they told me,” Kyne said. “I put out the brochures. I hung up the banner. . . .”
At 12:30 Tuesday afternoon, the official starting time for the computerized games, Kyne marched up to the green, countertop Lotto terminal the lottery had installed at her store and punched in the code to start it up.
“Nothing happened,” she said. “The stupid thing didn’t work.”
Lottery officials in Sacramento said Kyne was one of 315 retailers throughout the state whose machines did not function properly Tuesday.
But 4,589, or about 93.2% of the green machines installed by the GTECH Corp. of Providence, R.I., did work, and the officials said they considered that “terrific.”
“It was thought we might have even more that didn’t work,” said Bob Taylor, a lottery spokesman. “GTECH (which has installed Lotto equipment for states and nations around the world) said it was the smoothest of their 17 start-ups.”
The machines are used to place Lotto bets. For each $1 bet, a customer picks six numbers from a field of 1 to 49. The machine enters the bet at one of the lottery’s two central computer facilities and prints a ticket the player uses later to claim any winnings.
Taylor said the problems encountered Tuesday--which ranged from inept clerks to malfunctioning equipment--were rapidly being rectified by GTECH and lottery field personnel.
Kyne said GTECH’s emergency number kept her on hold for 50 minutes Tuesday--”while I got mad and the customers got disappointed”--before someone came on the line.
“When they finally came out, they told me it was a bad machine,” Kyne said. “They brought me a new one, and it’s working great.”
While the Lotto games are not enjoying the initial success of the instant, “scratch-off” games that started in California a year ago, lottery officials said they were still doing better than expected. By 4 p.m. Wednesday, statewide Lotto sales totaled more than $1.74 million, and the officials predicted that this weekend’s jackpot could exceed $5 million.
Lotto bets are accepted from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m., except on Saturdays, when the system is closed at 7:53 p.m., approximately five minutes before the drawing to determine the winning six numbers. The first drawing will be held Saturday during a special promotional program televised statewide from Beverly Hills.