It takes more than a winning lottery ticket to change an accountant.
Of the 15 accountants splitting Wednesday's $15,477,335 Lotto 6/49 jackpot, nearly everyone plans to use the winnings to pay off bills and mortgages or make some strategic investments.
Not Dianne Sherring. She's buying her husband a boat.
"He's wanted one for years," Sherring said as she and her colleagues picked up their cheque at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming prize centre yesterday afternoon.
Now, she said, he can have one.
The group – colleagues from the Burlington waste management firm Newalta Industrial Services – has been buying lottery tickets together for roughly eight years, and always picks the same numbers, said another winner, Jim Vallance.
It's only happenstance that there are 15 of them and $15 million to share, Vallance said.
"It's a coincidence," the Grimsby resident said.
Still reeling from the news, the new millionaires struggled to contain their high spirits long enough to pose for photographers.
"Yahoo!" whooped fellow winner Doug Steeves as he gave a happy dance for the cameras.
Sherring's hands shook as she passed the cheque – a regular one, not an oversized novelty – to her colleagues.
Though the winning numbers were revealed Wednesday night, the group didn't know its luck until the following morning.
Sherring, the group co-ordinator, was too busy to check on Wednesday, like she usually does.
When she got to work yesterday morning, co-worker Sandra Cooper, another winner, insisted she look up the results online.
"Dianne and I both hate our jobs," Cooper joked when asked about her urgency.
(Two of the winners plan to retire in light of their windfall, but not Sherring and Cooper.)
Sherring caved in to the pressure and logged on to the lottery website.
"By the time I got to the fourth number, my heart was beating fast," she said. "By the time I got to the sixth number, it was like `Oh, my God!'"
The pair's resounding shrieks of "Oh, my God" soon alerted the entire seven-floor office building.
"I think all of Burlington knows," Steeves quipped.
"It was just like the commercial," Sherring said.
The winners come from Grimsby, Hamilton, Smithville and St. Catharines. They are between 32 and 70 years old.
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