I process major lottery wins — I've seen everything from winning tickets in the laundry to people who almost claimed too late. Also, a giant snake.

• Andy Carter processes millions of dollars in major lottery wins — and has seen some close calls.
• Some people almost missed out on a fortune by forgetting about their tickets.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Andy Carter, who advises lottery winners for Camelot, the operator of the UK's National Lottery. His role is to process the prize money for major winners and ensure their ongoing welfare.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

My job is a real privilege because you get involved with someone at a stage of their life that they will never, ever forget.

When there's a major winner in the UK's National Lottery, they get passed to my team. We're the people who handle winners of £50,000 ($63,000) and upwards.

Although my job has a strict process from a regulatory point of view, we are also all about experience.

We try to make sure that lottery winners have great support, great access to advice, and that it should be a pleasant experience — because actually people are in shock at this point.

A six-figure ticket in the laundry

One time, I dealt with a man who claimed his prize with us in plenty of time.

He was an older man and he lived by himself, and he put his trousers in the washing machine along with his wallet.

In the wallet was some cash, along with his winning ticket — it was worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Anyway, the wallet came out of the washing machine with everything intact. But the banknotes were all sort of screwed up. So he gave them a quick iron — and he also gave his ticket a quick iron.

The paper in our tickets reacts to heat — when the heat of an iron hits it, it goes black. Everything. All the numbers and all the barcodes — all the information we need on the front of the ticket just went black.

He was horrified.

But as he had already called in before this happened, we already had all the right information from him, the numbers and so forth. If he hadn't called in, we'd have had a real problem.

We had to do a lot of investigation, and he had to wait a long time for that money to be paid — 180 days is the claim period, and we had to see whether or not anyone else would come forward with a ticket.

He got paid eventually — but it was a six-month wait because he ironed the ticket.

The man who guarded his winning ticket with a snake

So you've got this valuable piece of paper, and you are worried about it. Who do you trust to protect it?

We have to assure winners when they call that actually, look, yes, we need this ticket, but you've given us the details now. If someone were to steal that ticket, you could ring us and we have procedures to put a stop on that.

But still, occasionally they come up with some odd places to hide it.

I've seen people keep their tickets in the dictionary, under "W" for "winner." They keep it tucked behind photo frames of loved ones. Some women keep it in their bras.

We had this one guy who said that someone — I forget the name, "Sid," or "Bert," or whatever — was "guarding it."

I thought this was a friend. But then he pointed over, and there's this snake in a tank.

And in there was this big pile of rocks, and then underneath the rocks was a rubber envelope. Apparently the snake doesn't like rubber and won't touch it. And in there was the ticket, because no one was going to try to put their hands in past that.

He said to me, "How do you like snakes?" and gets it out and puts it around my neck.

My kids were young at the time and I thought, oh, this will impress them, their dad holding a snake.

$90 million tucked behind the sun visor

There was a massive Euromillions winner from Boston, in Lincolnshire, England.

No one came forward to claim, for weeks and weeks. And we were publicizing it, saying in the media: "Are you the Euromillions winner in Boston?"

Anyway, this guy came forward about two, three days before Christmas. He was a builder or something like that, and the ticket had been in the sun visor of his van all along.

He'll have forgotten about it. He would've got in his van, stopped off at a gas station to get a sandwich, bought a ticket, got back into his van, and put it behind the sun visor along with bits of paper, receipts, and stuff.

It was worth £70 million ($89 million). Huge. Huge.

Note to lottery players: tidy your room

There was a player who was 18 or 19, something like that, who lived at home with his mom and dad.

He'd been tidying his room and had found the ticket, worth a couple of hundred thousand pounds. He hadn't even known he had it — it was just a case of his mom telling him to tidy his room.

We have 180 days to pay a prize out after a draw, and I think he phoned up on Day 179.

So we had to drop everything to get it processed on time. It involves going to his house, completing the paperwork, all that sort of business. The clock is ticking.

I remember standing in his kitchen with his dad, who just shook his head, saying: "He's messy, he's untidy, I've been telling him for years."

Day 179, yeah. He was a lucky boy. If he'd left it another 24 hours, 48 hours, it would have gone. He wouldn't have had the money.

Big lottery wins send the team 'buzzing'

Whenever we have a really big winner, the machine sort of slips into play. There is a lot of excitement, it's fantastic. The whole place is buzzing.

It's about actually making it very special.

And that's the thing with this job — you have to take it as if they're your first lottery winner. They deserve for it to be special and not mundane or routine.

If you win the lottery, you want someone to make a fuss.