Bait and Switch will Never Die

I have been sick all weekend.  No real symptoms...just an intense fever and a bit of nausea.  Mostly been watching Mad Men, which is fun to watch but doesn't seem to have a point.  Then I felt a little better today and thought I would try out Firefall, some kind of massive online FPS.  I signed up to be in the Beta while I was at Pax.  At least, that's what I thought I did.

What actually happened, is that I was standing at the enourmous Firefall like multi-booth with this girl that is hooking up with one of my friends when one of the booth guys walked over and asked if I wanted to be in the Beta for Firefall, and handed me a tablet to give them my email address.  Then instead of turning to the girl next to me, he made a big deal of something about how he was so sorry--he shouldn't have assumed I would be the only one of us signing up for the Firefall Beta (shouldn't have given me the tablet first...blah blah blah standard pathetic geek mysogynistic penance).  This girl was annoyed and signed up for the Beta.  I guarantee she has no interest in playing the Firefall Beta.

Turns out that doesn't matter.  Have you caught on yet?  Lets replay a bit.  He asked if I wanted to play the Firefall Beta, and then I gave him my email address.  That was the transaction.  He didn't say I would be in the Beta.  I wrongly inferred that I was trading my email for a spot in the beta.  That was the bait.  What I actually got by giving up my email address was an account on their message boards, and advertising emails.  That's the switch.

Its a bit humbling to be the one getting fooled like that, but seriously, who does that?  "Would you like to be in the beta?  Give me your email"  seems pretty clear.  Kind of like "would you like another PB&J sandwich?  Give me your plate."  I think its reasonable to be surprised if your plate comes back with a stack of advertising.

I used to feel some kind of self-righteous rage about this kind of thing but now it just seems typical.  I'm only interested in the cleverness of it.  Think about how that worked.  I need to go out to a bar and try that.  "Hello would you like a million dollars?...Give me your number...What??  I bought a lottery ticket in your name, what did you think was going to happen?"