It's now a regular annoyance of daily life – proving you aren't a robot. Every day you most likely come across at least one instance online where you have to prove you aren't a cyborg or a clever algorithm, in order to look at your depressingly low bank balance or watch another cat video.

This is despite the fact that robots can already "prove" they aren't robots.

We may one day get to the point where we have to start proving we aren't robots in real life. Robots could become so realistic we're unable to tell the difference between humans and machine.

We're not there yet.

We're really, really not there yet.

However, for some of us, the day of proving we aren't a robot in a face-to-face environment has already arrived.

Marci Robin went to a car dealership on Sunday and was asked to prove – in real life and using a pen and paper – that she was not a robot on a printed-off version of the captcha test.

It was not a joke.

After investigating the matter, Jalopnik discovered that this was neither a joke nor a one-time thing – it was company policy.

"The sales guy was handing me paper after paper with a brief explanation of what each one was for," Marci told Jalopnik.

"And then he handed me that page – with literally nothing else on it – and just matter-of-factly said, 'And this one is just to ensure you’re not a robot.'

"We both said, 'Really?' And I don’t know if he’s just done it so long that it was normal to him now or what, but he was just like, 'Yep.'"

It's unclear what the dealership would have done if she had been unable to pass this foolproof test, though people have speculated a robot could have completed the captcha without breaking Asimov's laws of robotics.

The company policy, Jalopnik reports, is to replicate everything that someone would have to go through if they were purchasing a car online. Even the bit that proves you aren't a robot. Which as a policy is, let's be honest, reaaaally freaking baffling and unnecessary.

As a bonus, it led to one other tweeter reminding everybody about the time an advert in a physical newspaper asked readers to "click here".