A couple weeks ago, I had my Xbox Live membership renewed for me because I forgot to cancel it before they billed me for this year. Since I recently finished a game with extra downloadable content, I decided to sign on for the first time in a long, long time to grab it -- and promptly discovered that I'd forgotten my profile password (four buttons you press on the controller when you log in). I dutifully filled out the support request form on the Xbox Live website, and eventually received a semi-automated response along the lines of "it looks like you forgot your Windows Live ID password."

I politely informed the robot of its mistake, but I also headed over to the Live ID login page in case I'd been forced to establish one for my email address when I signed up in the first place. Having failed to login (I'm pretty sure because I don't have a Live ID), I requested a password reset, which required entering my email address and solving out a CAPTCHA, which was one of the more visually confusing ones I'd run into. This failed a few times, so in a last-ditch effort to ensure that I really didn't have a Live ID, I opted to try my luck at the audio CAPTCHA rather than the visual one. I actually don't, it turns out, but that's not the point of the story.

Here's the upshot of this post: the audio CAPTCHA in question.

If you don't want to listen, imagine a numbers station playing on a broken loudspeaker in a busy train station, and you'll have some idea what this mess sounds like.

Is this unusually bad, or am I just not particularly sharp? I had to replay it at least six times, transcribing a couple digits at a time, since they weren't even kind enough to embed the audio in the page somehow so I could type the digits as I heard them. It's like they're punishing the visually impaired for being visually impaired.