Mini Rant # 5 Let me in already!!

I understand the degrees that websites have to go through the fend off automated spam. I just hate that I have to suffer for it.

Simple log in's have turned into detailed questionnaires. Efforts to fend off identity theft have caused the far majority of honest internet surfers to be bombarded with a variety of authentication procedures if they make even one mistake imputing a password. And lets not forget the hassle of a forgotten password, or the auto lock out feature for too many failed attempts.

Of all these features I will agree that most are a acceptable inconvenience, but one annoys me to no end...


I don't know the official name so I'll call it the "Visual Verification".
It's those jumbled up numbers and letters that you have to type in along with a password, blog comment, or post.

The entire look of it always makes me think, "Is this what dyslexic people see all the time?." They trail from that question to the the episode of Batman the Animated Series where Batman discovers he's in a dream engineered by the Mad Hatter because one side of the brain controls dreams and the other controls reading, (btw, is that actually true?)

Anyway, the other day I was trying to sign on to YouTube and I wasn't 100% certain what my password was. The next thing you know I was presented with this annoying prompt.

Sometimes they make it easy for you by actually making it a real word. That way, even if you can't make out a letter or two, you can still take a guess to the overall word and make out good. But nooooooo! They had to use a bunch of garbled letters and numbers. (and you can NEVER tell if it's a zero or the letter "O"!)

To then make matters worse, when I made a mistake (oh yeah, that was gonna happen), I wasn't told if the mistake was in the username, password, or verification prompt!

I then notice this little speaker button next to the verification and I think to myself "I'll just listen to the letters and type them in."

Now it may be hard to describe sound in a written media, but it would be no exaggeration to describe what I heard as, a cluster of static and garbled voices. Like 15 people all holding different conversations at once with a old TV in the background on no channel. I even thought I heard one whisper something antis-emetic...(family guy reference)

This level of annoyance is just crazy. I know computers are smart but why do I need to be made to look stupid just to post a blog comment, or share a link?

If computers ever became sentient beings they already have all the tools necessary to get entertainment at my expense...


Share your thoughts below and See ya next blog!!