You know how you always have to verify a weirdly distorted word before you can get to a certain website or access some personal account information? It’s like at the bottom of a webpage and it asks you to type in the word that you see. Well, half the time it’s so flippin’ distorted that unless you yourself were tripping on LSD, there’s no way to distinguish most of the letters. And it’s very rarely an actual word. Sometimes it’s almost a word, but you can’tquite tell if the “cl” is a “c” and an “l” or actually a “d.” It’s all about the negative space. Now if the rest of the letters are “i, m, b”, your brain might make the leap that the first two letters were actually “c and l.” The brain really likes that kind of completion. But, depending on the evil nature of the webmaster, it might have been set up to purposely deceive you into thinking the word was “climb” when actually they were using a “d” to throw you off track. Honestly, who wants to get into these websites so badly that they have to employ these kinds of subversive maneuvers?
I seriously spent like 15 minutes this afternoon staring at what I thought was the word “paramour.” Apparently it wasn’t. But if you err one friggin’ time, they change the darn word on you. This is absurd. Did you know these things actually have a name? They’re called “captchas.” According to Wikipedia, “A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.” Because what, humans are more capable of figuring these silly things out? Frankly, I’d bet that a computer, or perhaps a highly socialized chimpanzee, would have a better shot at deciphering some of these. When did the world become so damn complicated anyway?
I miss the olden days; when a handshake was every bit as valid as a Legalzoom contract, and if you wanted to get a free account somewhere you just needed to transfer a few hundred bucks into it. Plus they threw in a toaster. Today if you want to buy tickets to a concert you have to decipher some amorphous hieroglyphic cryptogram to prove to some computerized entity that you, unlike them, are actually a human being. It’s gotten way out of hand if you ask me.
Btw, if you can successfully decipher all the captchas on this site, you win a free subscription to my blog! (No bots need apply.)
Unmotherly Insights 
Now you know how us red/green deficiency people feel when we fail those stupid dot tests. I remember how bad I felt when I was the only who couldn’t pick out the number or letter in the pool of dots. I remember going to Albany NY to test for the NYS Parole dept. I passed every part (even the physical believe it or not), but then failed the dot test. When I asked why it was so important, I was told I needed to pick-out license plates against indistinguishable backgrounds. I suggested they give me a page of plates and see how I did. I conceded that if the car was painted in those stupid dots, I might not be able to pick out the plate #, but the likelyhood of a felon violating parole being that creative was pretty unlikely. They then suggested a get a single red contact lens for one eye, which somehow would compensate and allow me to pass the test. I turned them down as I didn’t want to walk around with one brown eye and one red eye.
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Excuse me but WTF does this say? I can’t make it out.
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Loved this post. So true. Damn those things.
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Thanks so much for making me laugh this morning! I certainly share your frustration of sitting down at the computer to complete a task that will only take “a couple minutes” before heading out the door for work, groceries, etc. only to find that 20 minutes later I am not only running late, but I haven’t even accomplished the task!
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