Yahoo locked me out of my account for 12 hours?!?

I tried to log onto an older email account that I only use for things like Youtube and stuff, but when I typed in the password, even though it was correct, it gave me a spam checker where I had to verify I'm not a bot by typing in the codes. Fine.

So I do that and it sends me ANOTHER checker that asks me a security question, "Who is your Favorite Uncle," because it doesn't "recognize" my computer or something? Now I'm livid, and so I have only two uncles. I enter one in, it doesn't work. I enter the other in, it doesn't work. I check to see if it's a caps lock thing, and I end up getting LOCKED OUT OF MY ACCOUNT for 12 hours. I'm going to be angry if I tried to come up with a "creative" answer to the dumb security question (and even more angry if this is a caps lock thing).

The whole reason that I was getting on the account was that an email was sent to me so I could recover a password from a site that had forced a password change "to ensure the safety of its online users." And, if I don't answer the email in X amount of time, the link will go bad. I wanted to get on that site today, not tomorrow.

I'm getting SO sick of all this password / safety crap. It's starting to get too confusing to keep up with!

What can I do to have them unlock my account? Try to access it from my laptop instead? What does it mean that it does not recognize where I'm logging in from? First, how does it know where I'm logging in from (that's just creepy)? Second, this is the same computer and IP address I used to make the account a couple years ago, so why does it keep notifying me every time I try to access my own email accounts (it keeps sending emails to my main email everytime I access one of my smaller accounts)?

It's driving me nuts!