FORT MONTGOMERY – Robin Poptanich is New York’s latest winner of a big lottery prize.

And it was his job as a medical equipment technician that steered him on the course to that big payday.

Poptanich, 63, was driving from his home in Middletown to a job in Yorktown Heights one day in December. It was not one of his usual stops. He usually serves clients in northern New Jersey.

Poptanich was early, so he stopped at the Fort Montgomery Food Mart on Route 9W to buy a coffee and a couple scratch-off tickets for the $10,000 a Week for Life game.

He continued on to the job site, but the office wasn’t open yet when he arrived. So, to kill time, he scratched off his tickets.

The first one? No prize there. But the second? There was a coin symbol, meaning an automatic win. He continued scratching, uncovering the “life” symbol.

He had just won $10,000 a week for life!

“It was a life-changing thing,” Poptanich said Thursday, recalling the moment he scratched the ticket.

The first thing he did was to call his wife, Judith, to tell her the good news.

“I let her know I was not joking,” Poptanich said. “And I told her to call our lawyer.”

When he called his daughter, she asked if he had shown the ticket to anyone else, just to confirm it was a winner. He hadn’t. So he showed it to someone at the job site. And he thanked them for having a job for him to do that day.

Poptanich chose to take his prize as an annuity and will receive $344,106 a year, after taxes are withheld, for the rest of his life. The minimum payout is $10 million.

On Thursday, Yolanda Vega, the bubbly New York Lottery spokeswoman, presented Poptanich with the traditional oversized check symbolizing his prize, and introduced New York’s latest millionaire-to-be.

Poptanich has notified his employer, Horiba Medical of Irvine, Cal., that he’ll be retiring in June. After that, the first thing he and Judith plan to do is take a vacation cruise around Iceland – something she’s always wanted to do, but they didn’t have the money for it.

Then he’ll buy a new house, take care of his family and enjoy life.

“It means a total end to stress about money,” Poptanich said.

mrandall@th-record.com