Don’t quit your day job… How many hours a day do I spend in front of a computer? Let’s see, I spend roughly half an hour in the morning, about seven hours at work, another half hour checking email and various social networking sites before dinner, and about two hours after dinner. Although I have become accustomed to having Excel do my calculations for me, quickly adding that up in my head comes out to ten hours. Ten Hours! How much of that is useful? Well, I’d like to think the hours at work are, but you would think I would cut back when I’m at home. Not so much. But hey, if you are reading this, you probably are at eight plus hours yourself. So…mechanical turk. I haven’t been doing it for long, so my opinion is just based on a few hours. I actually have some fun doing some of the surveys and postings. I get to do some creating writing. I watch some youtube videos I would have not seen otherwise. Maybe I’m contributing to some important research that will change the world, or at least help someone write their dissertation. It’s better than browsing sports websites. There is some sense of satisfaction of making a few extra cents during the time I would have spent reading an article about some athlete or celebrity I will never get a chance to meet. Ultimately, the experience is supplemental, something on the side, something I’m curious about. If it ever becomes routine, that’s when it stops being enjoyable. That’s what I’m taking away from this. It is what it is.

In the last six months I have been sitting eight hours a day at my job. I have started getting a little pudgy around the mid section, which isn’t great. So I thought about to start exercising again. I use to run all the time and enjoyed the routine. I decided that I wanted to get some new shoes. I quickly discovered that Nike has a new device that will track your running and give you feedback about your performance. I decided that I must have this setup, which is an Ipod Nano, Nike+ sensor, and the shoes. But nothing in life is free so I needed around $255.00 to in order to have these items. Don’t know about you, but this is a lot of money. I started searching the internet to discover how I could earn some extra cash to buy these things. I discovered Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and tried a few cheap requests. I needed to verify that this would actually pay me and I could achieve my goal of earning the money I needed. I did a couple of surveys and saw that it worked. So I am doing very odd jobs on the Internet as I work towards my goal. So far I have only earned a few cents, but it is a start. Who knows maybe after a couple of days of this I can have ten bucks that will help save me some money, and get in shape. So that is how I got started.

You give me 250 words to share my story and pay me .20 cents for it. Well, that just about sums up life on Mechanical Turk. I’ve only been using Mechanical Turk for about five days and haven’t made much money so far, but Mechanical Turk certainly isn’t my life’s ambition or even my means of supporting myself so I’m not too worried about that. Currently, I am a 25 year old full time college student with a job at a restaurant, but right now its summer and I was curious if you actually could make money off something like this and I can always use a little extra cash. Mechanical Turk is an interesting idea and I wish I had signed up earlier when it seems like there was more money to be made. Writing 450 word articles for .50 cents isn’t exactly fantastic and I can’t believe what quality and expertise some of these requesters expect for .50 cents. I would much rather be flying through a set of images and tagging them for a penny a hit that pouring out my soul for .50 cents. I chose to do this hit because it is 2A.M and this project seems genuinely interesting even though I won’t get paid much for my efforts. My curiosity to see what Mechanical Turk had to offer is why I am here and I think that in the end it was worth trying out. Hey, at the very least I’ll come out with some money to go towards next semester’s book purchases.

I recently read an article that was a press release of a study that stated that most Americans spend 90% of their waking hours staring at glowing rectangles. Of course, I read this from my computer’s glowing rectangle. It didn’t surprise me. I spend a lot of time on my computer and have been baffled by the infinite potential of information to be gleamed from this glorious internet. So when I ran across Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I was immediately intrigued. Why not harness the time used in front of glowing rectangles for some money? Suddenly sitting at my computer became less of a time waster and more of a potential candy bar slowly being formulated one HIT at a time. I’ve recently been taking time out each day to get in a couple HITs and noticed how I forget exactly how many I did before I’m finished. I like this hazy ambiguity since it comes back to surprise me a few days later when my HITs start to pay up. As long as I keep a conveyor belt of hits going, I have a micro stream of money. I like to think of it as my conveyor belt of potential candy bars. I don’t really eat that many candy bars…but if there was a replacement currency of equivalent value for HITs, it would be candy. Even if the machine breaks down because I have plans come up, or I just forget about Turkin’, I still have some pocket change to put to use. It’s like finding coins under the couch cushion…but in the 21st century of glowing rectangles.

I’ve read a lot of the stories posted in www.mechanicalturkdiaries.com but I think I am not like any of those. I am both a turk and a requester. I am a turk as I love to see what kind of HITs other requesters make and I also get ideas, but I’ve only completed 3 HITs so far, including this one, so I am a lurking turk… so as to say. I am a requester too, a time buyer if you will. Posting a HIT and seeing how it gets done in minutes is addicting. The best HIT I’ve seen is one about calling a restaurant with Skype and asking them if you can bring your own wine. I’ve created HITs for people to create funny ideas, jokes, paragraph of nonsense text, articles and what not.

I am gainfully employed, but currently on a three month sabbatical. The first few days of my sabbatical were horrible because I did not know what to do with myself. Then I discovered Mechanical Turk! I started with a few penny jobs. You know the kind, where you answer a questions. Then I took on a few more complicated hits, like transcription. I have thoroughly enjoyed this work, because it has broadened my abilities. For example, I have always enjoyed writing, but have never really written formal articles. In just three days, I have written five articles and several reviews and discovered skills that I have not had an opportunity to express before. I am not looking to get rich off Mechanicalturk. Who can, really? But I do enjoy making a bit of extra cash to use for my holiday spending next year. I have set myself a personal goal and will keep at it during the early hours of the morning when I can’t sleep, or in my spare moments in the afternoon. I find being a Mechanical Turk helps me to relax. It focuses my concentration, almost like a brain game. I enjoy exploring many topics and tinkering with new apps that sometimes appear as a hit. It has been a good experience for me and little by little, a profitable one too. I look forward to seeing what appears next on my hit list.

A few years ago, I was gardening for my mother. the garden itself had been really overrun with weeds, so I planned to cultivate the entire, very large, garden. I pulled some pointy tools from the shed and began my work. Everything was going very well. The sun was beating down on me and I could feel the tan starting on the back of my neck. I finally got all the weeds out and the time came to begin digging down to flip dirt. I grabbed a four-pronged tool and began to break up the dirt. It started out just fine. I took one last whack and screamed as I pulled my tool from the earth. On the end, stabbed through the heart and brain, was a toad. I have never returned to gardening. Perhaps I am better off just to stick with m-turking.

Want to know who I am? Yeah, sometimes so do I. I’d like to think that I’m more than just who I am, that my life has meaning and that I’m meant to make a difference in someone’s life. Maybe I am maybe I’m not. For right now all I know is I have school, a new job, and a girl. A girl who loves me more than anything, and still wants to be with me even after I lie or cheat. It’s not that I want to, it’s not that I don’t love her; I do love her. It’s just that I feel the need, the urge to be with others when all I want is her. All in all, I’m kind of messed up. But she loves me, and that’s all that matters. I’m tired of the planning, the organizing, I’ve submitted to the randomness. So I have a week until my new job starts but I hate sitting at home doing nothing, so I found mturk and started doing some random HITs, it occupies my mind enough to keep me from scratching at the walls. I just wish some people payed out faster. It’s great watching my Total Earned raise when i open a new HIT. Kind of making me think about all the pennies and nickles i let slip away. I’m finally learning that all really adds up. If anything other than gaining a few bucks here and there I think I’m learning a bit more responsibility.

I am one of fourteen. That’s right, fourteen. I was born to a family as the fifth child, and there were nine children to follow. My father had only one wife, and she never had any twins or triplets. Oh no, she had us the old fashioned one-at-a-time, not this new age septuplet or octuplet style. I am also young, I am only 23, and my youngest sibling is still 10, so its not like this happened in the “good old days” when such a thing was normal. I was also home schooled. It seems that these things go hand in hand, large families and being home schooled that is. We were not Catholic, nor were we Mormons. No, indeed we were good old fashioned southern Baptists, and we did not live in the middle of nowhere on a farm. No, as if in some cruel reality series we were not in a place where our unusual family would go unnoticed, nor a place where we would be loved and accepted, we grew up in a very large city. People here do not believe in having more than one-point-eight children, and we were the laughingstock of our church for years. I am currently working on a graduate degree, and I have far surpassed the education and ability levels of those who used to laugh at me. I finished my bachelor’s degree when I was only 19 and I am now working towards my Ph.D. My siblings have similar achievements, high level degrees by 20; own their own business at 19 etc. I am one of fourteen, but we are fourteen in a million.

Out of my high school group, if anyone ever asked who was the most straight of all of us, everyone would always point to me. Everyone else either had experimented with the opposite gender, or wanted to. Females never caught my attention. I never found them attractive. I never saw myself doing anything, not even kissing, with another female. Even when we would throw parties, and i would get wasted and got a bit on the wild side, not once did i attempt or even got close to doing anything with another female. Exactly 8 weeks ago, my best friend and i, kissed. Since that day, we’ve been “together”. I haven’t told anyone, because i’m afraid everyone will change how they perceive me. One thing i know for a fact, i have NEVER been this happy. This girl knows everything about me. She accepts my every flaw, and loves me, and cares for me. We were close before, but now, we’re much more than what we were before. five minutes spent with her, make my day. I can’t help but smile when i’m with her. I have trust issues that go way back to my childhood. I was raped constantly for over a year by my father. I have had a few boyfriends, but i never felt nearly as comfortable as i feel around her. I have never trusted anyone the way i trust her. I lay in bed with her, and when i look into her eyes i can SEE that she loves me. She looks at me and i see that she feels lucky to have me. She often reassures me that i mean the world to her. She tells me she wouldn’t change me for anything. She lets me know how much i mean to her. And for the first time ever, i believe. I believe everything she tells me. I love her unconditionally. I don’t care if we can’t tell our families because they won’t accept it. I don’t care about any of that. As long as i’m with her, i’m happy.