Captcha Gotcha!

Houston, we have a problem.

And I want to hear from anyone else out there who has had this problem. Because I fear it may be an increasingly prominent one in our always-connected, increasingly cloud-based cyberexistence.

I was in meetings last week in NYC... you know, with actual people... and I was trying to look someone up on Twitter.

You know, on the actual Twitter website, not a Twitter application.

Only to discover I apparently no longer knew my password.

So I set about trying to recover my password from Twitter.

But my account had been blocked, because apparently I tried to get into it too many times.

Shame on me. Trying to get into my own Twitter account! What kind of psychopath am I?

So then I tried to have Twitter send some info to my email and/or phone number.

Nothing ever showed on my cellphone, a number I've had for years.

And I assumed the account was set up so long ago, that I probably included my Hotmail email address.

So now I went to Hotmail to login.

And guess what happened?

Of course. I no longer knew the password.

So I tried to recover the password.

And that's when the Captchas stormed the castle.

You know, those cute little boxes where you enter characters that no mere mortal can read, much less interpret, so you can try and access what you assumed to be your account?

The people who invented those? They're now officially on my most wanted list. Right up there near No. 1 and closing fast.

So then I thought, perhaps my Hotmail address became a Live.com address.

So I tried that.

More Captchas. No success.

I refused to throw down my sword. I was going down fighting.

Especially considering this was Microsoft!

So I tried to sign up for a new Outlook cloud account. I would simply start over, begin anew, and smell the spring roses of the azure fields.

It wouldn't likely help me in the pursuit of reclaiming my Twitter ID, which I'm pretty sure has been hacked and is now manned by some pimply-faced 14-year-old twerp somewhere in Eastern Europe.

Now I'm starting to get paranoid, thinking perhaps Microsoft has me on its hit list.

Because when I tried to submit the new Outlook account request, it was kind of like the Internet equivalent of the Windows hourglass.

And people laugh wondering why in the world I said earlier in the year I was going to break out my Underwood manual typewriter!