I'm having to go through some support channels for a product and it's a pretty terrible experience.

1. Find the support page.
2. Choose "live chat".
3. Enter your first/last name.
4. Enter five CAPTCHAs where you must identify the group of dice that add up to the shown number.
5. Answer seven questions from a bot.

After step five you're either told they're experiencing a "high volume of support requests" and recommend you repeat these steps again later or you're placed in a queue of 300 people.

There's a few aspects to this that make this painful:

• "Live chat" – Getting misled into thinking I'm going to talk to a human immediately after spending several minutes on the CAPTCH feels like a switcheroo.
• CAPTCHA – This CAPTCHA takes a long time to solve given there's 5 dice for each of the 5 trials that you must add up. If you get a trial wrong, you have to repeat the entire set of trials.
• Abandonment due to "high volume" – This hurts after the time you've spent solving the CAPTCHA and providing the requested answers. There's no way to skip the queue later or to provide a method akin to a callback.

At least they have my current position in the queue and by my calculations, I'll be up in about an hour or so.

Is it ironic that The Verge just posted about CAPTCHAs?

Update 2024-01-06: After several days of trying to get in contact, I was able to get in touch with a support agent and resolve the issue. Goodness.