I choose to do Mechanical Turks after one of my husband’s coworkers jokingly told him about it as a job for me because they had heard about it on a pod cast. When I checked it out the first time I thought it was completely worthless and a waste of time until I learned how to use it correctly. I thought it was kind of neat to be able to sit down at night after all my kids have gone to sleep and make some extra cash while I watch TV. I am a stay at home mom and the little bit of extra cash we just use for little fun things for the kids (like outings or little grab bag toys). I love making money and not having to work a set amount of hours or go into an office. I love being able to do it from the comfort of my home and in my pjs. I also love not having to drive a car or go anywhere. I have worked several stay at home jobs over the last 7 years and they have always been hard to do while trying to raise three babies. This is perfect for me because I never have to worry about my kids being to loud or my employer being upset about the amount of time it takes me to complete tasks. I always tell people about it so that they can make a little extra cash in these hard economic times too.

My name is “Heidi”, I am 27 years old and I am a single mother to two great children. I was in an abusive marriage for four years until I finally got the courage to leave. Now I spend every day loving life not fearing it.

During the 1990’s it was our Thanksgiving tradition to have dinner with my sister and law and her family. Each year after eating and cleaning the kitchen we would all go for a walk with their family dog, whiskers. He was a very old dog of mixed breeds and small in size, slightly bigger than your average cat. His fur was messing in spots due to his age and no matter what he had been bathed with he smelled pretty bad. But this little lovable dog had been around longer than most of the children and he was very much a part of the family. The kids kept asking their “Uncle Bob” if we were going to walk Whiskers and he would give them a distracting answer not wanting to upset the little ones because Whiskers had been missing for a while and due to his age we all thought he probably had left us. When dinner was finished my daughter came running back in the house and retrieved Whiskers leash and said “lets go”. Bob was very surprised to find his smelly little dog waiting outside for all of us, but of course he was absolutely thrilled. My in laws were new to this neighborhood and had only lived here about 3 months. So we headed out on our walk. Coming down the path towards us was another afternoon walker. The man exclaimed “Scruffy! There you are boy I was out looking for you! Why do you people have my dog on a leash?” The man quickly regained his composure and apologized and of course we let him know it was OK we weren’t offended. Bob let him know his real name was whiskers. Due to this funny looking little dog that had the ability to be loved by so many human friends Bob gained a really great friend and neighbor that day.

I am a university student. For the last 4 years, I’ve been studying in an international university in my home country. It’s a good place with academically excellent people but it’s a place that can cause stress to some type of students. Most of the lecturers are excellent but they really don’t know how to teach and interact with their students properly. I live among those people and the problem seems to be quite a pattern among us. Being the happy person that I am isn’t enough to prevent the stress outbreak from infecting me. So, after the second semester of the 2008/2009 session, I took a break for 3 months to stay at home. At first I don’t think that it is a good idea to skip a semester since I would be delaying my study plans and graduating time. After a month, it turns out that it really is a good decision. My stress, migraine and fatigue are gone, I’m having a wonderful time at home with my family. Helping out my family business and taking care of them are actually a good therapy for stress. Thinking about it makes me realize that being with your loved ones is probably the best and free therapy for a lot of things. Don’t be afraid of the thought of missing things in your life for the sake of being with the people you love. It really is worth it. It’s a suggestion, if it works for me, I’m sure it would do something good for you too.

I am addicted to computers now. My addiction started in an interesting way. At that time I was in a job and I was serving in a rural district. Computers were almost unknown to people. A few times I saw some people working in computers while I went to metro cities for some business and imagined once I will also work on it. But could not find a way. Once one of my subordinate told that in the nearby polytechnic school a computer training is being started but the course was for the students only. Immediately I contacted them and I had to take the help of one influential and powerful person. As the instructors were of my age or a bit junior a very friendly relationship grew up. There was no fixed time to attend classes or restriction on duration of practice as was applicable to others. I used to go there in the morning, attended office and after my office hours I again joined the class in the evening. The computers were with Intel 80286, 80386 and only one was 80486 processors, b/w monitor and some have to be booted with a 5.25” floppy and only DOS could be run. The difficult problems of the students were discussed in my presence and gradually I started solving them. After the 6 month course I felt so interested that I took a bank loan and bought a PC with 80486 100 MHz processor. It had no HDD. I had to boot it with a floppy, create a RAM drive, load FoxPro files there and I saved my files in 3.5” floppy. Now all these feel like a dream.

Mechanical Turk has been a huge impact on my life. From leading a life of a daily routine of going to college and coming back straight home without being able to have some fun as lack of money was the basic reason to living a life of a mini luxury at the level of a student. Here, luxury refers to those extra activities that we students can do such as watching movies, hanging out coffee shops etc. And how did I manage to afford this extra luxury? Answer is Mturk! The site that allows you to earn money for doing easy jobs such as writing articles and reviews and verifying sites and taking up surveys ! It’s such an amazing concept of providing work and a living to those who need it and providing a 24x7 large scale globally spread labour for companies or individuals. I am indeed very grateful to my buddy who introduced me to the site. Initially, I did not figure out the easier way of earning. I used to click hits which payed0.05$ which was quite a small amount and this way I had to work on 20 hits to just earn a single dollar. But soon I found out hits that pay 0.20-0.30$ and which were quite easy to work on. And in a month, I had earned around 40$! Well, that might be a small amount for most of the people. But it was more than sufficient for me to meet my daily requirements. Well, Mturk is indeed a great site.

A friend first told me about Amazon Mechanical Turk back during my senior year of high school, which was 5 years ago. I have been turking ever since then. It is a fun and quick way to make some pocket change. And if you save up, that pocket change can turn into a substantial amount of money. My favorite hits are the high paying surveys. Those are very quick and easy to do. I hate the transcription HITS. I never touch them because the time needed to work on them is not worth the amount they pay you. Ever. With the money I’ve made, I’ve bought textbooks for classes, a set of headphones, and I’ve also used some of the funds to pay for my bills! Again, MTurk is a great way to make some pocket change, which is still worth something, especially in this weak economy. I actually looked into what the name “Mechanical Turk” means and I find it pretty interesting. The Turk was supposedly an automatic mechanical chess playing machine. It basically was a large box with a chess set on the top with mechanical systems in the box. It beat many famous people, including Napoleon Bonaparte. However, it turned out that the Turk was not actually an automaton, but there was actually someone inside the box playing as the Turk. Brief history lesson aside, I am glad I started using Mechanical Turk. I’m glad that it’s run by Amazon, which is a reputable company. MTurk is awesome!

I found out about MTurk when I was still participating in a site called ChaCha to try and save up a little extra money while I was home after having ankle surgery. I thought it looked like an interesting idea, but for some reason, I forgot to sign up. It’s been a few months, and the other day, I was again looking online for ways to make money, as ChaCha has become somewhat unreliable. I recognized the mturk name as soon as I saw it, and clicked on it again. I logged in, wondering again what stopped me last time, and on my first day, I made $10 in just a couple hours. Sure, the amount that you make hourly typically won’t rival, or even come close to match what you could make working in an office environment, but in this economy, a lot of people don’t really have a say in whether or not they’re working. My husband and I would like extra money, but we don’t really need that much. We talked about what to do with the extra money for a little while - do we use it for “going out” money? Save up for a long time for a vacation? We had just gone on vacation, so we didn’t have a need (or vacation hours!) to plan for another one. And that’s when we decided we’d use mturk to buy ourselves something we’ve wanted for over two years. And thanks to mturk and amazon, I am now about halfway to a Nintendo Wii after only a week of working. That’s my mturk autobiography. What’s yours?

Turking is something to do until school starts in the fall. I work as a substitute teacher. I enjoy it and I like the flexibility of it. If I need to take a day off to go to the doctor there is never any hassle or explaining I have to do like with other jobs. I just turn down the assignment for the day. In a way doing amazon mechanical turk reminds me of that because I can work as much or as little as I like; no one is hassling me. The pay for most of the assignments is not worth the effort though, which is sad. But there have been days when I really needed the money badly so I worked turk 20 hours straight and earned $75. That’s a little over $3 an hour which is sad, but I had that money in my account in 2 days. I was able to pay my light bill, out gas in the car, and buy some groceries. So I kind of think of it as desperation money, kind of like selling your plasma. It has helped me to be more ambitious and careful with my money, and in the fall I plan on working every day instead of 2-3 days a week to earn and save more money. I work in an urban school system so there is never any shortage of substitute teaching assignments. The regular teachers are constantly getting burnt out and taking sick days. I may or may not continue to turk once school starts up again. It is extra money, meager as it is. I may just keep it at and just save the money for lean times. Right now it’s helping buy food and keep gas in my car.

My daughter and I learned about Mechanical Turk the same day. We decided to try it to earn a little extra money, but being the competitor that she is, she wanted to have a contest with me to see who could earn more money. The first day, I tried to earn a penny just to see how it would work. Then I got braver and tried for HITS worth more money. It got to be a fun part of my day, and I was learning a lot in the process from the various sites I was visiting. Then I got a notice from Amazon saying I was blocked from doing work from a certain person. Here I am, with a college degree, following the instructions, and the e-mail says that most times it is blocked for shoddy work. I started to cry, but my daughter said it was just a generic e-mail and not to be offended by it. But, I was. My work was not rejected, just blocked. I could not bring myself to try any more HITS for a few days. I will try some more later, but I will have to be more selective in the ones I choose. I probably will try ones where no one is judging my shoddy or non shoddy work. A little bit of joy is gone from this activity now, but I hope in the coming days, I will get back to earning a little money so that my daughter and I can spend it together next summer.