To err is human

Mounting evidence that I am losing my mind. Not once but twice this week I've sent an email to "UseTheYellowButton@ebay.com.au". Ebay has a nasty habit of bombarding your normal inbox as well as your eBay inbox with correspondence from potential buyers with questions and sellers who send you invoices. To reply, you're supposed to hit the yellow "respond now" button and respond. Reflexively I hit my browser's "reply" button, which gets sent to "UseTheYellowButton@ebay.com.au". I doubt it goes anywhere helpful. Anyway, so the first time I saw it I thought "hmm, that's an unusual email address, I wonder how you get an email address using @ebay.com.au? Maybe you have to be a store."

Today I had a question from a potential buyer. I hit the reply button and sent the response to "UseTheYellowButton@ebay.com.au". Hang on, I thought, is this buyer the same person that I just bought goods from? How comes she's in NSW when the seller I was in contact with said she was in VIC? Thinking I was about to reveal a huge eBay scandal proving once and for all that false bidders do exist in the form of people with more than one account, it registered. "UseTheYellowButton@ebay.com.au" meant you had to use the yellow button to answer. Der.

I also have numerous problems with those verification images that you sometimes have to fill in as a security measure. You know, the ones with mixed up numbers and letters on plaid backgrounds with lines and askew characters that you need to read to verify that you're human and not a machine so you don't spam sites. I mean, I know I have crap eyesight but there's something to be said of some styles of these images. The ones on Blogger are okay but there are several out there where you go "is that a G or a funky 6?" I have an accuracy rate of only 60% if there's more than three colours involved and angles of more than 15 degrees. You know, to err is human.