How many times have you heard this: Somebody wins the lottery, then immediately declares that they’ll keep their job and continue to lead their normal life. It happened again just a couple of days ago, when a Raleigh women collected the proceeds from her million-dollar lottery ticket and announced that, at best, she might retire a little early. In the meantime, she’ll keep working.

Ma’am, I admire your thrift and sense of fiscal responsibility. But if I win the lottery, I’m taking a big ol’ swan dive into debauchery, decay and dissolution.

Work won’t be in my future. I’ll return to the office, but only long enough to quit my job in person — and only after I’ve spent about four hours in a nearby bar to get me in the proper frame of mind for a memorable resignation announcement. (Wait a minute. I already did that a few months ago. Great. Now I’ve got to find another job just so I’ll have one that I can quit.)

When I think about it, I realize that I’ve been practicing to be a lottery winner all my life. As a kid, I was insufferable whenever I triumphed at Monopoly, paying other kids to move my token around the board or to fetch me something to drink. It felt great to lord my riches over the chumps who could barely afford to buy slum-row properties while I was living large on Park Place. Later, when I was grown and working in a remote office for a beastly boss, I used to fantasize about having a winning lottery ticket stashed away as I waited for his next abusive phone call, whereupon I would unload on him within hearing of the whole staff.

I frequently imagine how much fun it would be to have a fat roll of hundred-dollar bills in my pocket at all times so that whenever I saw somebody show a small courtesy toward a fellow human — you know, give up a seat so a pregnant woman could sit down, or be graciously patient when a trainee grocery clerk flubs a checkout — I could give that person a hundred bucks and say, “Thanks for being decent. Take your sweetie out to dinner tonight.”

I’d be a great lottery winner. I’d be a fine example of how to enjoy your riches. When the first reporter asked me whether I would continue to work after winning, I’d answer, “No fucking way” — then offer the reporter $10,000 if he or she gets that quote in the paper verbatim.

Hey, I told you there was a bad word in here. Don’t get all puritan on me now. Would a hundred bucks make you feel better?

I won’t walk you through the exact sequence of events that caused me to wander out to my garage and retrieve the carton containing the items from my mother’s safe deposit box, which had been sent to me after she died two years ago. That’s the kind of useless detail that clutters up a good story. Instead, I’ll tell you about the things I found when I examined the box’s contents.

There was the normal things, like important papers, treasured family photos, jewelry, gems and commemorative coins minted for special occasions. None of those, however, were particularly interesting. The puzzlers were items like the receipt from a visit my little brother made to the doctor in 1963, when he was seven years old. Or a collection of recipes involving various fruit juices. How did those things earn a spot in my mother’s safe deposit box? (Actually, once I saw that among the recipes was one for “Individual Prune Molds” made with lemon juice, I concluded that my mother may have sought to hide them as a matter of pubic safety.)

Then there was the item that was listed thusly in the inventory of the box’s contents: “2 molars (teeth).”

That’s right. Dear old momma had stored somebody’s teeth in her safe deposit box. I’ve asked several other relatives whose teeth they might be, and nobody has a clue. I only hope she came by them honestly. I’d prefer to not have the family named dragged through an episode of “Snapped.”

But the most revealing thing I found in the box was a matched set of death notices dating from the 1940s, two scraps of yellowed newsprint that had grown brittle with age. One of them was for my paternal grandmother, who died first, and the other was for her husband, my grandfather, who died two and a half years later. He’d remarried after my grandmother died, and his death announcement dutifully listed the second wife among his survivors. His children were listed, too — but only four of them. The two children he had with Missus No. 2 were conspicuously absent from the obituary.

With a little help from the family historian, I pieced together the explanation. You see, most of my father’s family had lived on the same block, and they hadn’t accepted the presence of the second wife among them. While they couldn’t ignore her totally, they could turn their backs on her children. It didn’t matter that the youngsters’ only offense was to be born. Disapproval came with their birth, just as surely as the rest of us came into this world with original sin. So their existence wasn’t even acknowledged.

It bears repeating: They were only children. I’d heard that the members of my father’s family apparently had some hard bark on them. But it takes a parched soul to visit grievances upon the innocent. I am sad to know this about the people whose blood runs through my veins.

It is one of the great ironies of the journalism business that those institutions which have pledged to stick up for the little guy and uncover the truth behind the doubletalk — and I’m talking about America’s newspapers here — usually do exactly that unless their own employees are involved. In that case, doubletalk and sticking it to the little guy are everyday occurrences.

Case in point: The News & Observer’s recent announcement to its staff that free delivery of the paper to employees’ homes will end Dec. 31 so that the N&O can be brought “into line with what has become standard practice in our industry.”

The fact that such a move could also add as much as $119 per employee to the N&O’s bottom line somehow wasn’t included in the announcement. Considering there are something in the neighborhood of 1,000 employees at the paper, that could be a nifty six-figure windfall for the company. You gotta love those industry standards.

Here’s how it works to the N&O’s benefit: The people who throw the papers onto driveways all over Raleigh and the surrounding patch of central North Carolina are compensated on a per-paper basis. Let’s call it a dime for every toss (and that number doesn’t come out of thin air). Every year, then, the N&O pays about $36.50 per employee to deliver the paper, which means there will be an immediate savings of $36,000 or so right there. On top of that, if every staffer agrees to pay the special employee price of $82.50 a year for home delivery, there’s $82,000 in additional revenue. Overnight, what was once a benefit to staffers becomes a revenue stream.

It’s understandable, of course, that the N&O would want to turn the outflow of money into an inflow. Times are tough in the newspaper industry these days, and pennies are being pinched in countless ways. But instead of simply acknowledging this undeniable reality, the N&O’s overlords portray it to the staff as a move to get in step with industry standards — as if the paper was in danger of losing its certification as a truth-guarding member of the Fourth Estate if it didn’t cut off this employee freebie.

Yeah, it’s an industry standard, all right — if your industry happens to be rhetorical fog.