When 70 households in the Spanish farming town of Sodeto picked the winning numbers in the Christmas ‘El Gordo’ lottery, bagging them $950m, the residents - understandably - felt like celebrating.

All but one, that is.

When the local homemakers’ association made the rounds with the tickets prior to the draw they somehow overlooked the home of Costis Mitsotakis, meaning that he was the ONLY Sodeto resident who missed out on a piece of the prize.

And I thought I was having a bad day...

Apart from Costis, the least that any resident won was $130,000, whilst many ended up with millions.

Maria Carmen Lambea told the New York Times how a friend had asked her to pay for a ticket for her because she didn’t have the money at the time.

As you might expect, her friend was a little nervous about calling once the win was announced - but Maria did the honourable thing and told her friend that the deal still stood and that she had won some cash. ‘Phew’ isn’t the word...

It wasn’t all bad news for Mr Mitsotakis, however. The day after the lottery win a neighbour called him and made on offer on a patch of land he’d been struggling to sell.

A day later another resident gave him an even better offer for the land, but Costis refused to get into a bidding war.

‘This is a small village,’ he said. ‘You don’t want bad feelings.’

Fair play, Mr Mitsotakis - we can’t imagine we’d take losing out on millions of pounds quite so well...

Tags: Fails , Funny fails