on free trials

I was all excited last night, because for the game for our CrossTraining meeting this week, we were going to play Family Feud. I had it all planned out. I found a great party version on the internet. Players buzz in using the two shift keys and someone types in the answer. It has a spelling fixer like google, and great graphics. It is really easy to use and pretty exciting for a big group. I tried it out, tested it from every angle on my computer in my office, like a good ole youth pastor. (Don't wanna be caught looking like an idiot in front of my teens, I thought.) Excited. My setup was this...I grabbed our laptop downloaded it onto that, and hooked it up to a PC-to-TV converter which displayed the picture on a 27" screen. I attached an extra keyboard and mouse, so the teens wouldn't destroy our new laptop, and we were ready to go. Family Feud. Yehaw.

The teens started getting there. I thought to myself, "Family Feud. Cool."

We started the game off girls vs. guys. The first round went great. "Name countries that begin with the letter B. "Bosnia, Britain, Bolivia, Bahamas - X" everybody was really getting into it.

The guys won the first round, but that doesn't really matter. What happened next was appalling.

About 5 minutes into the second round, the girls are answering thier question. They give an answer, Beth starts typing, and the screen goes black. Bwoo-fizzle. Then up pops on the screen this message, "Your Free Trial has Expired."

A groan falls from the startled crowd, followed by laughter. Great, just great. Amazing. Come to find out, the free trial lasts only about 20 minutes, which is nowhere written or publicized by the company I downloaded it from. I'm thinking, I've used free trials before...30 day trial, 15 day trial, 2 day trial. Nope 20 minutes, if that. Nice.

With some quick thinking in front of a crowd of people (which is always a fun thing, you gotta try it) and a lot of help from my wife and youth staff, we popped out an extreme version of Pictionate. Everybody loved it, and now they have something to look forward in a couple of weeks, the FULL purchased version of Family Feud.

Moral of story: My mistake was this: I just didn't goof off long enough testing the game. Play the game long enough for the free trial to expire, so that you can learn that you need to buy it in order to play it for any reasonable amount of time.