Tucked away for a rainy day
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.
