The Tragic Story Of The Restaurant Staff Who Thought They Won The Powerball

Everyone has been running to their local liquor stores, trying to buy Powerball tickets as the grand prize has reached an historic $1.5 billion, but not before employees in a New Jersey restaurant thought they won the previous $900 million pot.

The group from Grissini’s Restaurant in Englewood Cliffs was recorded accidentally reading out the numbers for last Wednesday’s pot instead of the then-updated Saturday drawing, so when their ticket numbers matched, they thought they just hit the jackpot, literally.

They obviously hadn’t been following the Powerball very closely, because not only did the office pool select the numbers from the previous $528 million dollar prize, but they even read out the numbers from that Wednesday, according to NBC News.

It almost feels like a devious prank, like the one Will Smith pulled on Geoffrey in “Fresh Prince of Bel Air”:

They thought that 2, 11, 47, 62, 63 and a Powerball of 17 were the numbers to their freedom as they hopped around, cried and someone even vowed to quit their job.

Unfortunately, there’s no video of the heartbreak in their eyes after finding out they didn’t win, but check out the video of their false hope below, even though it looks like it was shot with a 2004 Nokia flip phone: