Not enough exclamation points

A couple weeks ago, I ranted about the horrible CAPTCHA puzzles that keep trying to prevent me from logging into the local court system. I fear I didn’t stress my aggravation strongly enough. Last week, on a day when I had four court stories to write, the CAPTCHA system drove me to gibbering madness. The problem is that the court website times out after something like five minutes. So, if you try to keep the page open to use as a reference, you will find yourself logged out and facing yet another @#$!!@ CAPTCHA puzzle at every turn. On that afternoon, I had to complete no fewer than a dozen puzzles, failing several times, in order to log back into the wretched site. And they won’t take you back to the page you were previously viewing, oh no! That would be too helpful. You have to tediously conduct your search all over again and then make sure to interact with the page every few minutes lest you find yourself faced with more CAPTCHA madness. On that day, I was forced to identify buckets, curtains and traffic lights over and over, to the point where it started to feel like one of Dante’s circles of Hell. You have no idea how I’ve suffered! Except now you do because I told you.

Low effort shenanigans

So, just days after some terrible driver slammed through the side of Heathco’s Pizza in Auburn, some other weasel came along and stole a tip jar from the business. Not a brilliant crime, that one. The man who was eventually nabbed in the theft is 52 years old and clearly goes back to a time before security cameras became ubiquitous. No face mask, no hood pulled tight around his head… Police had such clear evidence of this crime, the officers may have trouble reading the thief his rights because of all the yawning going on. Now he’s in the county clink boring other inmates with “back in my day” stories about the good old days when tip jars and fundraiser collections were easy pickings.

Break out your torches

I was at a Lewiston grocery store the other day when a small crowd formed around the meat section. “Lookit these prices!” one red-faced man shouted. “Who the heck can afford to eat steak anymore?” Two other men heard the commotion, came over and joined us. They took a look at the prices — $14.99 for chuck! — and started grumbling right along with the rest of us. Before long, we had a proper mob right there by the meat coolers and we were ready to storm some gates with pitchforks! Problem was, none of us could figure out exactly who’s responsible for the obscene prices, and we didn’t have any pitchforks, so we just stormed the dairy section with toilet brushes, instead.

Mark LaFlamme is an award-winning Sun Journal reporter and columnist. He’s covered the nighttime police beat since 1994, which is just grand because he doesn’t like getting out of bed before noon. He is the author of eight published novels and rides a dual sport motorcycle everywhere he goes. Unless it’s winter, in which case he just sulks a lot.