THEY thought they couldn't go wrong.

But it was back to reality and the office for a group of fed-up Southampton surveyors who spent a whopping £692 on lottery tickets - and won virtually nothing.

The nine employees from Digital Terrain Surveys in Rownhams ploughed all the winnings they had ever collected from their syndicate into a frenzied lottery ticket-buying binge on Saturday with high hopes of hitting the triple rollover jackpot of £22.2m.

But the cold reality of what they had done set in yesterday after the colleagues huddled together at a friend's house painstakingly checking each ticket against the number draw without even the merest sniff of a million pounds.

Glenn Lickman, 27, of Leighton Road, Woolston, said: "We had five minutes of madness and we are paying for it now. We thought this was the big one so we may as well use all the cash we had collected to increase our chances."

He added: "I think the woman at the supermarket check-out thought we were joking when we bought the tickets and had to call the manager because no-one had ever bought that amount before.

"Looking back we have always been pretty unlucky with the lottery in the past - I don't think we will do it again."

Six ticket-holders shared the jackpot. They matched all six numbers to win £3,693,086 each.

The numbers drawn were 1, 4, 6, 18, 19 and 40. The bonus number was 30.