Too many ultra distressing lottery stories to handle recently — first we found out God doesn’t exist when a convicted child molester won $3 million, then the other week we had the poor dude who won half a million before being told his ‘winning’ ticket was a misprint.

This time we’ve got a Canadian man named Joel Ifergan who’s been denied $27 million because he missed the deadline by 7 seconds. SEVEN SECONDS. He’d bought the ticket just before the 9pm cut off date one evening in 2008 and has been fighting this case ever since. While the clock on the lottery terminal read 8:59pm, by the time the ticket was printed and registered on the Lotto computer it was 7 seconds past 9pm.

This is Joel:

Despite being in and out of court for the last 7 years arguing that the machine took too long to print, the powers that be decided he was getting zilch. No consolation prize, no free scratch cards, nothing.

Our question is – how does someone recover from this? Do you just keep getting up at 7am every morning and going into work like a poor person for the rest of your life? Can you even look at another lottery ticket ever again without having a complete nervous breakdown in the middle of the shop?

7 seconds, man – that number will haunt him for the rest of his days.

If you’re interested, here are the excruciating tales of 7 people who screwed up big time after winning the lottery.