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| Cute. But not me. |
A tough week at the office last week sent me into a sweaty dither. My office is a laptop on the dining room table. All the offices with doors are taken, bedrooms and such. My son even refers to the table, complete with candelabra, as my desk. This makeshift office makes me grumpy, but until somebody moves out, I’m stuck. What really got my blood boiling was less than human, proving to a computer I am not a robot. I can’t yelp about it but I sure as heck can blog out.
It seems every place I visit on the Internet these days, I must prove I am a warm body; I am human. With the start of a new school year, a bunch of new accounts are being created. A drag but it must be done. Online payments are the way to go and so are school assignments and grades. I’m also trying out hip high tech stuff like twitter, instagram and pinterest. All of this is really fun and really cool once you get the hang of it. And unfortunately they all require new passcodes. I think I’ve added five in just a few days. And you know how much I hate those things. See blog post: http://shoezle.blogspot.com/2012/01/password-pia.html.
The big show stopper are the verification codes. It’s worse than a thousand passcodes. Just when you think a new account is created, passcode rated “very strong”, the scrambled message comes up. You must type in two words written in such a way that most people think they need an eye check. “Crap! Am I really getting old?” “Is that an upper case ‘I’ or a lower case ‘l’? Is it an ‘r’ or an ‘n’?” It’s like trying to read messy handwriting on a computer and then translating it. It’s more difficult because many times the words are not real. Or they resemble the passcode you wish you could remember and then nobody could hack into your accounts, ever.
I know my eyes are getting older. (Not me of course, just the eyes.) I’m still on the good side of reading glasses as in not quite yet. But this kind of verification test, makes me question my real age. My eye doctor always treats reading glasses like a wonderful rite of passage. “Ahh ahh ahh. You are right there,” he laments as he holds his thumb and forefinger a millimeter apart. He just needs to add, “You’ll get ‘em next year.” I find this about as exciting as getting my first zit as a teenager.
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| Mama Office and Baby Office. Still can’t win! |
So last week, I was glued to my chair to get some promised work done. I took on a volunteer job where I needed to create a facebook page and with it a new email account. Guess which one was the most difficult? EMAIL! This is the oldest and easiest techie thing in the book. I was not going to go down easily. Criminy, even little old ladies can sign up for email, bad eyes or not. And they have the proper eyewear to boot, crossing over and all that exciting stuff.
I already have a couple of gmail accounts, one for me and one for shoezle. I don’t want to toggle any more emails on my computer so I go the Hotmail route. The first time I get through without too much trouble except trying to find a cool, AVAILABLE name. I get a name that is something like howard8182012@hotmail.com. Howard2 is taken and so are numbers three through too-many-to-try-anymore. I just throw in the date and it worked. Then my friend asked what kind of cool email address did I get for my project. “Cool?” Crap! I gotta go back and get creative.
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| It was way worse, I SWEAR! |
My second time on Hotmail got me HOT! I add “the” to my creative name and voila, it’s AVAILABLE. I fill out the rest of the form like good humans do and stop at a stage where I’m asked to prove my species to the Hotmail site. Well, CRAP! Again? I can’t read the code except for maybe two letters. Did I age that much in just a couple of days? I press refresh and refresh until I think I can make out a code. I type it in and REJECT! I have to start again. I won’t give up so I keep trying and keep getting rejected. Then, the system tires of me and boots me to an error page. I can go to a help page, but I don’t. I think this is a mistake, a Hotmail error, so I start over again.
This time, I try the audio version of the “prove you are human” test. You are supposed to type words you hear through the noise that sounds like a bad dream or racing thoughts from bad drugs or something. (I saw it in a movie.) I can’t get song lyrics straight so I am really miserable at this task. (Elvis Costello’s Allison was forever Anacin to me.) And again, I’m so bad I get booted to the error page again. I click on the help button this time and read it. “How to type in verification codes.” That sounds like me but I can’t believe there are written instructions for this sort of thing. Basically I learned that I shouldn’t include a space between the two separated words, like the picture. I’ve passed as human on MANY occasions by including the space and now I’m told not to do it?
I tell my techie husband my techie whoas and he gives me the “User error.” To his credit, this is sometimes the case as tech + Me = implosion. Man, this makes me more HOT than Hotmail not treating me like a human. I KNOW it’s not me and I’m willing to prove it.
I go back a third time and try typing in the verification codes. Again, they are sooo scrambled I can’t read them. I try. I try it without the space. I try the voice again. And my competitive self crumbled and threw in the towel. “That’s it! I’m taking my free business some place else.” I’m going to another FREE service where I am treated like a human when I have to prove I am not a robot. I’m getting a FREE email with “the” in the name. I’m getting gmail, my third one. I have more gmail accounts now than I do children. Google is trying to take over the world and they are doing a very fine job of it, one gmail account at a time.
Since this writing, Microsoft has softened up their email sign-up approach. Setting the mood, the Microsoft logo now graces the top of the page in a calming blue color. It feels polite being asked how I would like to sign in. Or, “help them make sure I am not a robot” instead of “prove you are not a robot.” And the verification is not even a code and it’s actually readable and audible. Must have sensed I was incensed and own a blog. However kind, in the words of a human, “Snooze you lose.”
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All user error! wahahah.. wahahahah.. (sinister evil laugh)
– anonymous techie hubbie
and the funny thing is I got one of those robot filtering passcodes after trying to post my comment here. (got it on the first try!)
wahaha…wahahahaha…wahhahahahah..(even longer,more evil sinister laugh)
-anonymous techie hubbie