Trials of the CAPTCHA

(This is a pretty tongue-in-cheek essay about what a musician has to go through to be all networky on Myspace these days, all for the sake of anti-spam safeguards. Please don't take it too seriously...because I certainly don't). Ok, so I'll own up. I spend a lot of time on Myspace. I prefer to think of it as "networking" and "discovering new artists" rather than wasting time...and it can suck you in. You find a great deal of neat people and music, and as is now the vernacular, you want to "friend them." And then maybe you want to leave a comment. Innocent enough. Except I guess evil comment-making robots have taken over the internet, so Myspace (and a great number of other sites that allow commenting and the like) now require you to sometimes type in a CAPTCHA to prove you are a real person. In fact (nerd alert), CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" (thanks, Wikipedia). Wow. Of course. So when you're up late at night, maybe like I was, deciding to friend some people because you like their tunes, and did I mention it's late and you had a long day with a 3 hour gig and then maybe you saw your friend's band play and it's...late? So here's how it goes for me, and why the CAPTCHA probably needs to die. (Note: I don't know how real CAPTCHAs are made so just bear with my lame examples). First time...an annoying string of letters, usually readable: I will occasionally screw this up. Maybe a "J" looks like an "I", or something. So it spits out another CAPTCHA at me to try again: For whatever reason, I swear it's always longer and slightly more askew. This skyrockets the chance that I will type this one in wrong, too. Sure enough I screw up, and now my humanness is in question. Try again: WHAT. Instead of the CAPTCHA machine thinking, "Wow, this might indeed be a human but a slow one...maybe we should lighten up," we inevitably get an even longer one with twisted letters and symbols that don't exist on a keyboard. At this point I get annoyed and bang out something approximate. I just want to comment on Katie's wall that her new cat photo is cute. That's all I want to do! Next: Oh that's nice. In a fit, I probably type something like, "HJA592QJAJDJ34SDJ4224FJ#)$*@)#*$@." Because that will fix it. Now the CAPTCHA wants to play games. Right. So I guess Katie will never know her cat is cute. Not due to me, anyway. And that Indistrial-Folk-Punk band from Glasgow I wanted to friend? Didn't happen. I hope you're happy, CAPTCHA. You have denied my humanity.