Those damn robots!
Post last updated 2 months ago
The cappuccino was decent, but the thick smoke from only 2 or 3 people smoking at the tables around us made it unpleasant to breathe. Thankfully, it wasn't too cold in the closed patio of the bar.
Robots! Those damn robots**! I did everything until I reached them, but I couldn't pass them. I wasted two hours yesterday trying to pass the robots!
I looked half puzzled, half amused at my aunt, a woman in her sixties who had had most contact with technology only in the past decade, but I assured her that I'd help her set up her Microsoft account, as I thought the issue was some captcha verification. She was taking a course and needed to open some Word documents, but Microsoft wouldn't let one use Word without an account. So I commenced, on her lower-end Samsung (or maybe it was a Motorola), which was freezing every other second, to create an account for her on the damned platform. Unbeknownst to me, the process of creating an account there had become more complicated than I remembered.
For some reason, on her phone I could only create an account by selecting a Hotmail address, and the fact that it took tens of seconds between when content would load drove me insane. I had to change the vector of attack: using my iPhone might work, or at least would not kill me with boredom. After loading Microsoft's site on my phone, I could create an account with any email, so we went to the next hurdle. The robots!. I correctly predicted that it was a captcha, a graphical one, but oh man, I wasn't prepared for this. For the first time in my life, I really had to pay attention to the little puzzle (which was rendered at about 10p). After the initial shock and some eye-squinting, I passed it. I only had to do it four more times.
Alas, I passed the test-I wasn't a robot-but Microsoft wouldn't let me have peace yet. It kept asking for a phone number. I'd enter it, confirm the SMS code, and rinse and repeat. I think the third time they got the memo that I, in fact, had correctly confirmed the phone number.
War was over, and my aunt could finally read her documents, but I got very close to thinking I might be, in fact, a robot!
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