David Edwards (46) was a victim of the tech sector meltdown. The reformed armed robber lost his job this year as a technician at a fibre optics company. He needed back surgery but had no health insurance. Saturday was a particularly depressing day as his ex-wife was getting remarried and he was down to his last three unemployment cheques.
That evening he called into Clark's Pump N Shop in Ashland, Kentucky, bought $8 worth of Powerball lottery tickets, and "asked the Lord to help me out and give a hand".
The Lord obliged. Edwards won a share of a $295 million (€324 million) jackpot that translated into a cheque for $41.4 million cash. To put this sum into perspective, it is $10 million more than the total of Microsoft's profit over 23 quarters since the software firm listed on the Nasdaq six years ago, and more than 50 per cent higher than the amount Tiger Woods has earned in all his professional tournament wins to date, or just about as much as Aer Lingus lost in the first six months of this year.
Such personal windfalls were of course almost commonplace among the high-tech entrepreneurs of yesterday, when launching a dotcom company was a more surefire way of becoming a millionaire than filling in a lottery ticket.
Stephan Paternot, for example, an undergraduate at Cornell University, and his business partner Todd Krizelman, found themselves worth $97 million each, after they floated their interactive website, theglobe.com, in 1998. Like so many dotcoms it flamed out, and closed its doors two weeks ago "after six amazing years".
In a just-published book called A Very Public Offering, Paternot reflects on how easy it was to create wealth and live a celebrity life in those days of super-hyped stock, blissfully unaware of the headlong approach of that deadly machine, the business cycle.
After losing a bundle by investing heavily in another doomed dotcom he now says: "I won't make huge bets on individual companies anymore, because it is pure gambling." Just how much was won and lost by gamblers in tech and dotcom firms has been highlighted in a survey of the Nasdaq Composite Index, which is heavily weighted towards technology stocks. The report, by Multex.com, shows all the Nasdaq firms' profits from the related boom of the late 1990s have now been wiped out.
By August this year, the 4,200 firms listed on the Nasdaq had made $145 billion and lost $148 billion. Since the autumn of 1995 the companies that came to symbolise the New Economy have collectively, as the Wall Street Journal so delicately put it, not made a dime. As the first books on the lost generation of dotcom entrepreneurs appear, the day-by-day chroniclers of the New Economy are disappearing. The San Francisco-based Industry Standard was founded three years ago to track the dotcom boom.
Last year it employed 400 people, including 150 journalists, and attracted $150 million in ads. Facing losses of $50 million this year it has gone the way of the phenomenon it reported. On Monday, its parent firm, Standard Media International, filed for bankruptcy.
The remaining journalists at the Standard organised a telephone tree to relay the information to each other that it would no longer be published after this month, and that those employees taking an enforced summer holiday should not bother coming back.
Many Wall Street workers who made big money while the going was good are also not coming back after the dog days of summer vacation time, which officially ends after next week's Labour Day holiday. The bursting of the Nasdaq bubble and the economic slowdown has given the US financial world its worst patch for a decade, with profits plunging and bonuses disappearing in the absence of acquisitions, mergers and those wonderful, fee-spinning IPOs.
Rumours abound of widespread layoffs. The New York Times reckons 30,000 Wall Street workers are facing pink slips. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan have all trimmed their staff.
All sorts of ancillary jobs are going too, like head-hunters. Last week, Paul Reilly, chief executive of Korn/Ferry, the world's biggest executive recruitment company, cut pay and laid off 400 employees. Ironically, one of the big winners in the slowdown is Las Vegas. Convention attendance in the Nevada gambling mecca jumped 13.4 per cent in the first half of the year to 2.4 million. Part of the reason is the cheap hotel rates and meals.
But perhaps disillusioned Americans chasing the dream of instant riches have come to the conclusion that making a wager on the turn of a roulette wheel or filling in a lottery ticket is as good a bet these days as taking a plunge on the Nasdaq. As David Edwards said when he received his cheque: "A lot of people work hard and a lot of people are out of work. And you dream you want a better life, and playing this lottery has done that for me."