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.)