I am Your Robot

... not that I particularly like Elton John, but it fits.

Right, as most of you know, my PhD is concerned with patent data, which I mainly get from the EPO. For some time, as I was establishing pure numbers, my work involved quite monotonous clicking through their online database.

With learning curves and the all this, I developed some speed in doing this over time. And was greeted with the following:

Apologies for the poor quality, but check the Error Message... >>Client has been determined to be a robot due to recent behaviour!!<< With two exclamation marks. So I am a robot - and definitely in the wrong film.

But! They've worked on the database to improve it, as we can read on page 34 of their recently published Annual Report 2005:

So they're proud of blocking poor little robots. *sigh*

I'm not going to complain. I just sometimes wonder what I've done to book the receiving end this time...