Last friday I went with my father and his ex-girlfriend to the sea. It was so blue, so blue! Fucking blue, I mean, it was nice, it was as if I was on an island. It was nice. I swam this wonderful crystal clear sea … Maybe it’s dirty, I don’t know, but if I see what’s at the bottom of the sea, I have such a nice feeling when I swim … And I was thinking, that if J comes, and see this kind of sea that we have, even in Athens, even in the most polluted town in the whole Europe … he is going to love it! … With debts that continued to pile up, and all credit cards failing - first one, then the other, then the other - the little cash that turking allows to make is (sad but true) not merely welcome. It’s necessary … Last winter I fell in love in Holland, but had to come back to Greece. It just couldn’t make it there. So I left J. behind, for he has to finish his studies. Will he ever make it over to me in Athens? Or am I just illusioning? Even though it gives the least of money what I love most turking is moderating images. All these pictures from one does not know where that randomly are popping up make me feel like I set out on a journey. It’s a poor girl’s work, but still, it’s fun.
When my significant other first told me about the mechanical turk site, I thought she had lost her mind. A site where you did tasks for as little as a penny? It sounded like the type of setup one would find at a sneaker factory in southeast Asia. But when I accompanied her to the office one day, I decided to bring the laptop along and try out the site while she took care of some paperwork. I started by scanning online ads for mentions of weaponry, and I was immediately hooked. I was expending about as much energy as I normally would use playing mind-numbing games of solitaire. I soon graduated to sentence rewrites and taking five-second surveys on everything from the president of Russia to celebrities’ eyes. Some of the polls were serious, and some of the polls were just plain ridiculous. I think one actually asked me whether I enjoyed taking online polls. I also found a set of HITs where you fill in the last panel of online comic strips, and HITs where you read other people’s submissions and determined how funny they were. Some of the submissions made no attempt to be funny, and some made me laugh harder than any Garfield strip. And then I found out that I could make a dollar or two writing articles. They took only a few minutes, and I got to write about the subjects that fire my interests. Now I’m logging on early each morning to see if I can get in the Five-Second Polls before they’re all gone. I just hope my significant other doesn’t get mad at me for hogging all the survey HITs.
One would think that as someone who tests software for a living, that one wouldn’t want to work outside of the day job on a site like Mechanical Turk, but in my case, it’s a big help. I get lots of experience writing, and I earn a few bucks for some of life’s little luxuries. Why do it? Well, right now it’s because I have a husband who is sick and can’t work. I make enough for us to live on, but not enough to create a cushion. I’m not going to make six months of living expenses on Mechanical Turk, but every cent helps when I can drop it directly into an emergency savings account or add it to the amount sent in to pay debts. As gay men, my husband and I don’t have as many marital rights as heterosexuals do, so anything that brings in extra money is helpful. While his insurance is covered and he’s the beneficiary of my life insurance, he still wouldn’t get access to any pension I might have and I won’t even open the kettle of fish that is having young children. At least his family accepts me so I won’t have to deal with being banned from seeing him should he ever be hospitalized. Suffice to say that I need ways of finding even an extra five dollars here and there just to make sure we don’t have to worry in the future, and that’s what I get from Mechanical Turk.
I am a 40 year old female college educated mechanical turk. I am a new turk too. My husband and I moved our family to a large piece of land in the middle of nowhere last year in an effort to provide a better environment for our children to grow up in, and I just discovered this about three weeks ago. We are raising our own food, both meat and plants, for the most part. I was once part of the corporate work force, so this has been a huge change for me and my family. I love it. I love it here, but I find that I would like a little spending money, and I need some type of mental challenge to keep the gears oiled and tuned, so turking provides me with both. I play on the computer and get paid for it. This is pretty cool. Also, I answer surveys for researchers when they need it, even if it pays only a penny. I think that is somehow in a small way contributing to science. I feel like I am being productive when I turk. In my corporate career, I worked for a large insurance company. I did agency part of the time and claims part of the time. I still retain my licenses, and I also have some designations, but I am not real interested in working in insurance any longer. I have, however, ended up writing an article or two on insurance and transcribing recorded statements for insurance companies as part of my turk work. Hee hee!!! I guess it’s just natural since I know a lot about insurance, but it’s not my only work. I am more interested in growing food hydroponically and solar panels and windmills. We are trying to be self sufficient here on the farm. Turking keeps me connected to the outside world as well. It’s easy to forget about it when you are hoeing long rows of corn. I think if everyone could grow their own row of corn from seed—I mean till the ground, plant the seed, hoe it, pick it, shuck it, clean it, cut it off the cob and can it, everyone would be a lot more appreciative of a can of corn at the grocery store for .69. We have forgotten the value of a dollar and what it was originally designed to do. I don’t know how long I will do this. I guess as long as I retain interest in it. It doesn’t pay all that well, but I am here anyway, might as well turk.
I got into this Amazon Mechanical Turk gig to make a little extra money. I first noticed, to my disappointment, that most of the hits pay just pennies. At first, I thought accepting a job would waste my time. But I calculated that doing a couple of jobs each night (say, 30-45 minutes I would normally spend randomly surfing the Web anyway) could eventually prove helpful with some smaller financial emergencies/surprises. When I was little, a nightly ritual at our house was when my dad would empty out his pockets and show me a few coins in his hand. He would proudly slip the coins through a slit he had cut in the lid of a big glass jar, telling me that all that change would add up fast. And within a few months, just as promised, he would reap the rewards of his frugality, counting out his change on the table while the family looked on and guessed at the final amount. I figure that I’m doing pretty much the same thing in a virtual sense. I think he’d be proud that I follow his example and keep some mad money, however slowly it accrues, tucked away for a rainy day. It’s those pennies per night that can make a crucial difference for our family when our bank balance is dipping perilously low. So every night, I consider my nightly time spent on mturk as emptying out my pockets, trading a little of my time for some pocket change.
