Internet Speed Bumps

Okay so I hate, no... despise, the practice of websites forcing you to prove you're not a robot by entering a word or combination of characters displayed on a screen before it will let you proceed to the next page.  Some of them tell you that such practices serve a dual purpose by using what you enter to help turn real live books into digital books.  I mildly approve of this practice so up until recently I haven't minded terribly entering a copy of the characters I see on screen in order to advance to the page I wish to go to.  LIke I said, until recently.  Now they're making them so difficult.  First off, how are we supposed to get past this virtual speed bump when you can't even decipher what characters are on the screen?  They're working so hard to make sure we're not some sort of hacker that they're making it impossible for us to get to where we want to go.  Plenty of websites have missed out on getting my money because I haven't made it past this step on the first try, and I refuse to try more than once.   The other day I did try more than once and it was so cryptic that after no less than FOUR tries I still couldn't get past, so I had to give up 

This really pisses me off.  I suppose that what pisses me off is that we as a people have backed ourselves into this impossible corner where we rely on technology to the nth degree and yet we are also terrified of it at the same time, and this presents a major inconvenience to those of us who are just trying to innocently navigate our lives using the means which are expected of us by the corporations and employers who provide us our livelihood.  Which just really annoys me.  If we didn't want to be dependent on this shit, why did we allow it to take over our lives in the first place?  And why are we allowing it to become even more integral to our daily operations?  Who of us can imagine a day without iPhone or our digital camera or the least our plain old cell phones?

I watched "I Know What you Did Last Summer" this morning, which is not all that old, and all I could think the whole time was "why don't they just call each other on their cell phones?" until I realized that cell phones weren't really popular then and not everyone, including me, had one when that movie was popular. 

So anyway, I'm sick and tired of these internet speed bumps and am considering boycotting every operation that requires you to pass through one.  No more internet shopping, no more internet reservations.  I do not want to play into the hands of the people who believe that no matter how impossible they make it for us to use their websites, we will just accept it because we have no other choice.  We do have a choice and that is to remember what we did 10 years ago, when life was a tiny bit simpler and we were all surviving just fine.