What would you do if you won the lottery?

Perhaps you’d buy a nicer house or nicer car.

Maybe you’d travel or pay off debt and loans.

Maybe, just maybe, you’d buy a water tower.

It might sound weird, but one lottery winner actually did buy a water tower, and his idea for how to use it was a really, really bad idea.

Read the full story to find out what happened.

Bury an old water tower to use as an emergency shelter? Sure, what could go wrong with that.

So this actually happened to my dad a few years ago.

He lived in an area right along the Texas/Oklahoma border in fairly rural area.

My dad primarily worked in pipeline construction.

There was a new neighbor.

One day my dad noticed someone had purchased a very large property not too far down the road.

Turns out, that the new neighbor was actually from the suburbs around Columbus, Ohio and had just won a lottery prize.

The man hadn’t won the jackpot but had won a smaller prize around $2 million.

My dad was also originally from Ohio so he decided to say hello.

Jim sounds kind of odd.

A few days later he meets the lotto neighbor, we’ll call him Jim.

Jim starts telling my dad about his dream to build his own self sustaining homestead far away from the rest of society.

Jim was very interested in prepping and convinced of a soon to come global societal collapse.

He used his lotto winning to purchase the land and begin building his homestead.

My dad honestly didn’t find this that odd because many people in the area had some tendency toward independence and those prepping shows were popular at the time.

Jim had a really strange idea.

About a year later, Jim reached out to my dad to ask for help with a construction project that involves burying a large water tower in the ground.

My dad is a little confused but decided to go take a look.

Turns out Jim bought an old water tower (about 15 ft in diameter and about 15 high) for the purpose of reusing it as an underground shelter.

Jim had recently completed the build of a prefab home on his property and wanted the water tower buried partially under the new home with a trap door built in a closet to access it.

Nobody seems to think Jim’s plan is a good idea.

My dad immediately thought this was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard and proceeded to tell Jim all the potential issues with his plan.

Jim cut him off and told my dad that his contractor for the home had basically told him the same and so had several others he’d contacted to try get get them to bury this water tower.

However, Jim believed this was simply laziness on their part and had the utmost confidence in his plan.

Jim wouldn’t take no for an answer.

My dad left but a day or so later Jim contacts him again and asks about paying my dad to let him rent some construction equipment he had on his own property.

My dad again goes over with him what a bad idea this is and how no legitimate crew would ever do this for him.

Jim brings up using my dad’s equipment and illegal laborers.

My dad decides well if he’s determined, might as well make a few bucks off lotto winner Jim.

The friend doesn’t like Jim’s plan either.

He quotes him some ridiculous price to rent his equipment and says he can ask a guy at work he knows about gathering up a group of Mexican day laborers.

Jim agrees to the crazy price and my dad gets in touch with a Mexican friend who had a crew of day laborers.

A bit later my dad asks his friend about how the project is going.

He tells my dad how nasty Jim treated the workers, how stupid the whole plan is and how his specifications for how he wanted this built were completed idiotic.

They only did the job for the money.

Whenever they’d offer up suggestions or point out why something he wanted was wrong, he’d essentially shut them down and use a bunch of slurs for Mexicans.

So they buried the water tower and built this secret entrance exactly as he wanted, knowing it was completely stupid.

He mentioned they only completed the job because Jim was paying them way more than they were used to making.

Everyone agreed Jim was a jerk but all the more reason to gouge your prices and take his money.

Rain caused a huge problem!

A year or so goes by when my dad gets a frantic call from Jim.

It had rained quite a bit, which was unusual for the area, and now the entire ground floor area of the back of his home was bowed upward about 2 feet.

My dad goes to Jim’s and takes a look around, realizing what has happened.

Given that they had essentially just buried a large hollow object underneath his home, the rain caused the water tower to be pushed upward and right through his first floor.

The insurance company wouldn’t help.

My dad explained the situation and Jim immediately lost it, starting ranting about how he should have never used those Mexican laborers and how he was gonna make them come fix it.

My dad mentioned how that was probably impossible since most of them go back and forth across the border but Jim was livid.

My dad later found out from Jim that his insurance would not cover the damage to his home because he had buried a water tower under it without telling anyone.

That was a lot of wasted money.

He mentioned trying to sue the insurance company but that went no where.

He also tried numerous times to find the day laborers but was told you get what you get when you hire illegal workers to do a project that would never have gotten a permit.

Over the months afterward there was a lot of fallout for Jim and he couldn’t even live in his home due to the damage, it eventually was torn down to be able to remove the water tower from beneath it.

He burned through his lotto winnings pretty fast so he didn’t have anything left to rebuild it.

He ended up selling the land and moving away about a year later.

Some people don’t deserve to have a lot of money if they’re going to waste it on stupid, I mean really stupid, things.

Jim should’ve listened when literally everyone told him this was a bad idea!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

How much WOULD be enough to be an eccentric millionaire, I wonder?

This church had a similarly bad idea.

This person retells the story with the lottery winner as an evil genius.

Seriously, they only did what they were told to do.

Literally no one thought it was a good idea.

When everyone tells you your idea is stupid, they might be right.

Even Reddit realizes that.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.