Look on the bright side, things could be worse....
Dear friends, the protagonist of this cautionary tale had found things seemed to really be making a turn for the better. He was excepted into an excellent position that did not involve a job interview with a psychologist asking disturbing questions about dreams or hypothetical scenarios involving tortoises in the desert, and his coworkers were amiable. Best of all the work was an undemanding office job that involved completing simple tasks in the time allotted. Other than one embarrassing episode last week, he had little trouble so far.
Today, our protagonist found himself already ahead of schedule and considering an afternoon break if he should calculate that his progress was good. Since failure to complete the tasks assigned in the time allotted would quickly bring the danger of losing this new job, he decided it would be best to work through the break rather taking a chance at losing this promising employment.
Ah! The next task seemed easy! Just create five posts in fifteen minutes on the Hughesnet online support community with random provocative titles with each message post being identical! The message body was supplied along with a selection of acceptable titles -- a cut and paste task! Since there was a 97% probability that this task could be completed in under 5 minutes, the work for the day was promising to go smoothly.
In seconds, he was able to navigate the menu and login and begin his first post. With his submission came a slight pause that seemed out of the normal, and with a sinking feeling he took in the unwelcome sight of a Captcha! He quickly considered his limited alternatives. First, he could attempt to solve the devilish puzzle, but he was always poor at it and had never succeeded before. Second, he could contact the Mechanical Turk site for the humanity challenged and, for a modest fee, request the solution. But...they were always too slow and the odds of being able to complete the tasks for today on time with this delay were low. He had no choice but to move quickly to his only other choice. He turned to his coworker on his left and asked "Pardon me, Smithy, I seemed to have dropped my contact lens. Would you mind reading this sequence of letters and numbers for me?" as he pretended to fumble about blindly in a search.
Smithy looked at him oddly, then with great ease read off the needed code. What luck! He had been concerned that Smithy might question him because of the incident last week when he asked the solution for a Captcha while pretending to have something stuck in his eye. He had lost too much time trying to resolve the puzzle before attempting the ruse as a last resort and only narrowly completed the days quota. "I will soon be back on track today!" he thought as he quickly proceeded to enter the second post. His good luck did not hold. After only a few hundred milliseconds elapsed he realized he would not be able to keep this job....
Happy Holidays!
