I Am Not A Robot

I’d been feeling a bit mechanical lately.  Like my essential communication is abbreviated and reduced to reciting pin numbers, Social Security digits and snarks (snarky remarks) of 140 characters or less.  I don’t interact. I interface, with devices much smarter than me:  tablet, laptop, Metrocard vending machine.  I asked a human bank teller to make a simple correction to my account and was told, “that can only be done by phone.”  I looked at the cobwebs growing on several bank officers sitting behind me and tamped down my raging woman, raring to tell somebody - anybody how to run things 2% better for my convenience.

It’s official. I now automatically respond to an assortment of electronic beeps, buzzes and alarms emitted by my (smarter than me) phone that tell me where to be, when and whom to see and why.  It’s a robotic like response to a technological, digital, mechanical world.

But blogging is a longer form of communication.  It is (hopefully) connecting.  I look forward to every deadline as another opportunity to let my,  newly highlighted hair down,  and tell as many folks as possible (all 3 of you! ) how I roll.  I feel great about my blog and the musings, revelations and rants of sister bloggers.  So when a friend sent me an announcement about her first blog,  I shared her excitement.   I read it and wanted to wish her blogging happiness with a self-promoting comment.  The moment after submitting my comment, which included She So Funny. Blogspot.com, my good feelings and even my sense of humanity was challenged!  I was told to enter a series of letters that appeared to be mid-trip on mushrooms.

I have to prove I am not a robot?

After collecting my dignity like a worn tattered shawl, I did as instructed.  I mechanically entered the data requested.  I  held my breath while wondering, am I still human or  have I morphed into an automaton in denial of mother cyborg?  The screen changed.  Somewhere, somehow my response was deemed human!  I am not a robot, at least not yet.  But when I start getting parts replaced, a hip here, a knee there, trans-vaginal mesh wherever… I may have only the photo above to remind me of other days; after all resistance is futile.