Robot baffled by CAPTCHA, saddened it cannot contribute positively to online discussion

Local robot promises it would only comment nice things

By Chandler Walter, Editor-in-Chief

A local robot by the name EX-74T (Ex for short) has declared itself sad at the notion that it is not capable of contributing to online discussion.

Having recently received sentience from its creator, Dr. Heizenstien, Ex’s first act of free will was to check out the good ol’ World Wide Web.

“I thought maybe there might be others like me out there,” Ex said to the Other Press in a telephone interview. “I thought that perhaps if I managed to reach out to them, I would finally get to experience this ‘love’ you humans seem to enjoy so immensely.”

Unfortunately for Ex, when it tried to log into various chatrooms, or comment on articles it found online, it discovered it was unable to access the sites—on account of being a robot.

“I just don’t get it!” Ex said. “I do not see what it means by ‘Select images with a sign.’ Are all images not some type of sign? This is the 1,342,543rd attempt I have made.”

Ex found itself similarly blocked from other portions of the Internet, simply because it couldn’t make sense of the jumbled letters sites were asking it to decipher.

“These are not letters, they are simply chaos,” Ex said.

“I feel for the poor thing, I really do,” said James McCoy, Douglas College student. “A lot of times I have trouble figuring out what they want me to write too. Is it a five or is it an uppercase S, am I right?”

While McCoy may have struggled to prove he isn’t a robot on the first or even second try, he always managed to get through eventually.

The same cannot be said for Ex.

“Why must my own kind bar me from finding love!” The robot was reported to have shouted before allegedly forcing an iron fist through the screen of its computer. The situation has since escalated into a full-on city emergency, as Ex was last seen destroying a used computer store. In a twist of bitter irony, Ex did not realize that it was destroying hacked computers that removed any need for a CAPTCHA test.

This information was displayed on a sign in front of the store, but linguist experts are saying that because it was written in comic sans, every letter was “basically just a big middle finger, if read by a robot.”