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I’m not the kind of person who does things on a whim. I make lists. I color-code my calendar. I read the terms and conditions before I click agree. So when I tell you that I ended up winning big on a Tuesday afternoon just because my phone was about to die, it still sounds ridiculous even to me. But that’s exactly what happened, and I’ve stopped trying to explain it in any logical way.

It was one of those gray, drizzly afternoons in late October. I’d finished my work early, which never happens, and I was waiting for my boyfriend to get home so we could decide on dinner. I was scrolling through Instagram, lying on the couch, killing time. Then the low battery warning popped up. Ten percent. I groaned, rolled over, and reached for my charger. That’s when I realized I’d left it at the office. Perfect. I had maybe eight minutes of screen time left, and the thought of just sitting there, staring at the wall, was unbearable.

Out of pure boredom, I grabbed my laptop from the coffee table. It was old, slow, and barely held a charge itself, but it would do. I opened a browser and, for some reason, I typed in the address of an online casino a guy from work had mentioned during lunch a few weeks back. He’d been rambling about some bonus round, and I’d half-listened while checking emails. I remembered him saying the vavada register process took literally two minutes, and he’d gotten free spins just for signing up. I figured, why not? My phone was about to die anyway. What else was I going to do?

So I went through it. And he was right. It was painfully quick. Email, password, click a button, done. I didn’t even deposit anything at first. I just poked around the interface, looking at all the games, the bright colors, the tournament leaderboards. It felt like stepping into a carnival after being in a library. I was just browsing, honestly. But then I noticed the welcome bonus sitting there in my account. Free spins on some slot called Gates of something. I remember thinking, well, they’re free. It’s not like I’m spending anything. It would be weird not to use them.

I clicked the game, and it loaded up with this dramatic, orchestral music that made me immediately lower the volume so the neighbors wouldn’t think I was watching some fantasy epic. The graphics were insane. Way more detailed than I expected. I let the first few free spins play out automatically, not really paying attention. I was half-looking at my phone, which was now on its last gasps of battery. I won a couple of bucks here and there. Nothing special.

Then the bonus round triggered. And this is where it gets hazy. The screen changed. Tumbles started happening. Multipliers started stacking. I watched, completely mesmerized, as this number in the corner of the screen started climbing. Not slowly. It jumped. Twenty bucks. Fifty. One hundred. I sat up. I put my phone down. My full attention was locked on the laptop screen. The spins kept coming, one after another, each one adding more to the total. Two hundred. Three-fifty. Five hundred.

I actually laughed out loud. A confused, giddy laugh. This wasn’t real money. It was free spins. They’d given me free spins, and I was somehow winning. By the time the bonus round finally exhausted itself, the balance sat at just over twelve hundred dollars. From free spins. I just stared at the screen, waiting for it to glitch, to reset, to reveal the joke. It didn’t.

My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears. Twelve hundred bucks. That was a new couch. That was a weekend trip. That was three months of my gym membership. I immediately wanted to cash out, but I also felt this irrational urge to keep playing, to see if it would go higher. I fought that urge. I reminded myself that I had just stumbled into something absurd, and the smartest thing I could do was take the money and run. I initiated the withdrawal, and the confirmation popped up almost instantly. Processing. One business day.

I spent the rest of the evening in a daze. My boyfriend came home, asked what I wanted for dinner, and I just said, “I’ll pay. I’ve got it.” He raised an eyebrow but didn’t question it. We ordered way too much Thai food, and I didn’t tell him why until we were stuffed and lying on the floor. He didn’t believe me at first. He thought I was pranking him. I had to show him the withdrawal history on my laptop. When he saw it, he just shook his head and said, “That’s the most you thing that’s ever happened.”

And he was right. It was so perfectly me. I didn’t chase a win. I didn’t gamble with my own money. I just stumbled into it because I was bored and my phone was dead. The next day, the money hit my bank account. Twelve hundred and eighteen dollars, to be exact. I transferred half into savings and used the rest to buy a new charger, a decent one, and a nice bottle of wine to celebrate my accidental good fortune.

I still think about that afternoon sometimes. Not because I’m planning to do it again, but because it taught me that luck doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it just shows up on a rainy Tuesday when you’re bored and your phone’s about to die. I haven’t played much since then. I log in occasionally to look at the games, to remember the feeling, but I never deposit. I know I used up my one weird cosmic favor. But every time I see someone on their phone with the low battery warning, I smile. I know exactly what they should do with those last few minutes.