One actually asked me whether I enjoyed taking online polls
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.
