I’m a mechanical Turk and you probably don’t know what this is. No just because I am mechanical that it means I am a robot, infact I’m quite human. I do this website purely fun contrary to Wikipedia calling it a “sweat shop”. I found mTurk from a forum who was talking about another online money program and decided to try it. I treat Turking as a fun experience and what better way is there to get paid to voice your opinion on things. Turking has been quite addicting for my self and I assume many others as a great way to spend time when your bored out of your mind and nothing to do. Turking started out for my self as a way to make a few extra bucks in this tough economy. I figure since I spent so much time on the computer why not try to make money. I compared the money I make from turk to the money I collect from recycling plastics overtime that money will add up. Since I’ve started turking I have done about 130 HIT jobs, unfortunately only 33 have been approved the others are still pending. I will be greatly saddened to find out companies are using mTurk for free labor services. However only time will tell if these companies do pay the few cent jobs they listed and until then I refuse to count them into my experience. mTurk too me is still a great website to make a few dollars and I love the fact that its backed by Amazon.

It’s been a great week on the Turk. The American Astronomical Society dumped thousands of students tests out here looking for us to transcribe student comments at nine cents a pop. I made my daily quota several times over on these. Then Amazon Requester put out a ton of five cents hits that only required searching for release dates for various musical releases. I did a bunch of these, to fill out my quota foor most of the rest of the week. If only it could be that easy every day.

My husband and I currently live in a coop apartment which does not allow pets. We’ve liked here for over 2 years. It is both of our dreams to one day get a dog as a pet, but since we are not allowed any pets we considered other options. Finally my husband said “what about a cat?”. I thought about it for a minute and realized that other people in our building have cats; my next door neighbor has one! Then I said “well we work all day so we will have to get 2 cats so they can keep each other company” Then I considered the fact that i really didn’t like cats; well I never had one so how do I know that I really don’t like them? We did some research online about cats and for local adoption centers and found one relatively close to our house. I went there and filled out the application and returned later in the week with my husband. We saw these 2 adorable 8 week old kittens and instantly fell in love with them. It has been almost 6 months since we adopted our little furballs and can not imagine life without them!

Today I am 33 years old and have three children. I had all three children within the span of one year. My husband and I adopted our older two from Ethiopia. They are beautiful, kind, smart clever girls but I was young and thoroughly overwhelmed. I thought I was a horrible mother but really still wanted to have another baby. I can’t explain why. Maybe because our oldest two were not babies when they came home, but I think it was also because I was disappointed that these children were leaving me less than fulfilled. I couldn’t return to work and I had no time for balance in my life. I had no perspective and thought another child, this time a baby, would fill a need. In hindsight I probably had post-adoption depression. But needless to say, we got pregnant and our youngest was born just one year after we brought our first two home. After an exhausting three years my body caught up with these choices and I got severely depressed, had intense insomnia and anxiety. Now with some meds I have been able to gain some perspective on everything. I see that I need to maintain a sense of self, I see that being a good mother doesn’t take constant vigilance. In this anxiety I thought I was failing my children, which of course just spiraled the whole problem. But all of this really needs to be examined through my anxiety about not becoming my own mother.

I’m trying to dig my way out of credit card debt. I moved to a cheaper place to live, got a roommate to split all the expenses, I sold basically everything that was worth anything that isn’t absolutely vital, and I have cut out every expense I possibly could without doing serious damage to my health and well being. I read dozens of websites every day about saving money, making more money, stretching each dollar out to get the most you can out of every cent. One of them mentioned Mechanical Turk, and they asked if you could really make money off of it. Their conclusion was that there’s better things you could be doing with your time. I have to admit that when I looked at it the first time, I thought, “How much time am I going to spend to literally make a dime?” Yet here I am doing it! I’m not working all that hard, and I’m spending time when I don’t have anything better or more productive to do. If I’m making a few extra cents instead of playing online games or perusing social networking sites, I think that’s worth doing. I’m also bored, and since haven’t found a second job I’m qualified for, I’d rather be a Turk than fill that time with something that costs money. Hopefully I can string together a few simple jobs and make enough to pay for a “beer and a burger” as the old saying goes.

I am a college graduate but need more education and training in order to achieve my professional goals. I work two jobs because I like the flexible hours but the pay is not very good. One day I was reading my brother in laws blog and in amongst stories about my nieces and random junk you can find on Ebay and Craigslist he had a posting about Human Intelligence Tasks. I thought it sounded interesting so I checked it out and signed up that day. It became apparent that I am not going to get rich quick or be able to support myself on hits alone but it is nice for extra money. I have decided I am going to buy myself a Malibu Pilates Chair with my extra money, the chairs cost around one hundred dollars on ebay and I currently have twenty from doings hits so it might be a while. I told my little sister about it also so she signed up. When we find a “good” hit we call and tell each other about it. We define good as pays an ok amount but doesn’t take very long to do. Sadly by the time we call each other these hits are usually gone because other people see them first. My other sister said it isn’t worth it but I think that they tend to take as much effort as taking a quiz on Facebook, which is hat I would be doing if I wasn’t doing these, but I don’t get paid for Facebook quizzes

I graduated in 1999 from a technological school earning my Associates Degree in Accounting Computer Administration. Going out in the workforce, I used all the Accounting I was taught and applied it to the accounting tasks at hand and gained a lot of experience and over 10yrs worth of experience. I was looking for something legit to do online to supplement my income and I found MTurk.com I love Mturk.com because you can complete the tasks on your own time at your own pace and get paid for it. Just over two months ago, I moved up to Wisconsin from Virginia and have continued working in the Accounting field. I still continue to do Mturk tasks and I recommend this to anyone that wants to legitimately make some extra cash.

Honestly, when I first hard of Mechanical Turk, I was a little skeptical. However, the source that suggested it, a financial blog, was credible, and Mechanical Turk being connected to Amazon also helped me out with my initial reservations. I signed up and went hunting for my first task. It was a $0.10 reward to list a favorite of mine (this happened to be a local restaurant). I completed the task and decided I could do just a couple more on my laptop during commercial breaks in my favorite shows. Two hours later, I had earned $2.50. I have to admit, I was pretty pleased with myself, but I still wondered if I would actually see any of the money. After my tasks were approved, I transferred the money into my bank account, and one would never guess what happened– I actually got paid! I thought to myself, “If I got 2.50 every day, that could add up.” Even though I don’t normally earn $2.50 per day, I have earned enough to buy one of my favorite bottles of wine. I am picky about my tasks because I like them to be fast or fun. It is a little frustrating when your work gets rejected on a technicality, but that makes up such a small percentage of what happens with most tasks. Either way, I get paid to do something more constructive than zone out during a commercial! I’m glad I didn’t give into my initial skepticism, and I carry that joy with me every time I give my bank account a little boost through my Mechanical Turk earnings.

I am 20 years old. I am $90,000 in school loans. For the most part, my life is good and I try to stay optimistic, but in the back of my head, I am constantly thinking and worrying on how I am going to pay this off. I talk to kids at school and many of them have their parents helping them out with money and I become envious of them. I think that it’s not fair, and why can’t my parents help me? Then I realize that yes, my loan is very large, and yes, I need to pay it back all on my own, but I feel like I can appreciate my education more and not take it for granted BECAUSE I have to pay the loan off myself. When I first decided to attend an expensive school, people thought I was crazy. For that amount of money? Really? They would ask. But you know, you have to take a risk to get a reward. I decided to invest in myself because I believe that I will be successful. One of my favorite quotes is, “Happy are those who dream dreams, but are ready to pay the price to make those dreams come true.” Nothing comes easy. But I know that no matter how much I worry about my loans and paying them off, it will all work out somehow because I believe in myself and I know if I could not handle this situation, God would not have put me in it.

I became a mechanical turk on a whim. I had heard of it a few weeks before, but brushed it off as silly because of the small amount it seemed to pay. “Suckers,” I said to myself. I went back to my stack of diet soda and job applications. So many, many job applications. I wrote cover letter after cover letter, expanding minutia of graduate school tasks to the status of world changing events that occurred in the Manhattan Project or the Constitutional Congress. I may not be Jefferson or Edison, but did I know how to fill out a spreadsheet. I was frustrated by the rejections. I was frustrated by the lack of rejections. I spent my hours in solitude, twittering, reading, and watching television. And then, one day, I ran across turking again, in the wise words implanted in an email. Who wrote that email I’ll never know. I don’t think I deleted it, because I never delete emails. Maybe I dreamed the entire thing. Anyway. One description of mechanical turk mentioned how some tasks could not be completed without human interactions; robots could not do everything on the internet. I logged onto Amazon and signed up. I have since enjoyed earning some nice pocket change and I am doing my part to prevent robots from taking over. I have since advised others to join and we went to the movies with our hard earned money, money that will never go to robots, thank God. Viva Mechanical Turk!