I’m an American, but I live in China, teaching English. I teach about 10 to 15 hours a day, and although the salary is extremely low by American standards, I live fairly comfortably in my medium sized Chinese town. I’m happy here, studying Chinese and eating amazing Chinese food, but I do have a lot of spare time. Plus, I still have a few monthly expenses that require US dollar payments, like a student loan I’m still paying off. To avoid completely draining my US bank account, I use my Mechanical Turk earnings to replace the money going out. I also sometimes use the money I earn here to buy things online, since I can’t do that with my Chinese bank card. I buy things like subscriptions to Chinese study websites, MLB gameday audio so I can listen to my Cubs play live (in the middle of the night here) and Skype credit so I can call friends and family in the US. I make about $50 US dollars a month, which doesn’t really keep up with the bills or everything I want to buy online, but I don’t want to spend all my free time Turking! Chinese is a really difficult language, and I’ve got to study hard! Plus, why sit here in front of the computer all day when there is an amazing country out there waiting to be explored? I did a few Chinese to English translation tasks a few weeks ago, it was the very first time I’ve been paid for translation work. It felt good. I hope I will see more and more of these types of tasks!

I currently just graduated college with a music education degree. I am relocating to another country in a month to begin a teaching job. I will be teaching the natives of the country English at a small private school. Although I love music, this job will give me a much needed break from the activity. Like many recent graduates, I am currently in financial turmoil. I am looking for any way possible to make money. I have done work for a few employers but unfortunately the money has not come through yet. Although they are reputable institutions, the paperwork is traveling slow. I would pick up another part time job but no one will hire someone for a month and I understand that. I am slightly worried because it does cost a lot of money to start up in a new location, money that I do not currently have. I do have faith that the money from my previous employers will come through but I am scrambling right now for any money I can get. I stumbled across Mechanical Turk when searching how to get quick money. Although the return at the moment is small, every penny counts in my current situation. Once I start my new teaching job in a month, I will be fine. Making it through this month will be the first challenge. I am finding despite the small return, I do enjoy the small tasks that it requires. I am almost becoming borderline obsessed with it. Although there are other things I could be doing, I am enjoying my time as a mechanical turk.

Its been twenty years since I experienced the greatest shock of my life. A shock so soul wretching that I can’t seem to rise above it. It should have been the beginning of a beautiful life but instead turned my world upside down. You see I was naive. I met my future husband at the tender age of 14, he was 17. He was great looking, intelligent and a hard worker. He came from a lovely family. It was that lovely family that concealed the truth of their wonderful son. He was bipolar. Except in those days, it was known as manic depressive. He also was schizophrenic. Unbeknowst to me, he was well medicated and his parents covered for her intermittent not obvious to me anyway, breakdowns. He was also highly intelligent. We were married while he was in pharmacy school. He graduated first in his class. He decided he’d rather go to medical school than earn a living. I supported this nut as well as his parents and shrink. I had no idea of the depth of his insanity until we moved out of town. Within two weeks, he developed a southern accent to match the state we moved too. Slept with a pregnant girl who was herself married and dumped me flat. Today, I got no job, very little money, poor health and the knowledge that this pig is now a practicing cardiologist. I feel for his patients and I feel for myself who just not to quite was able to rise above this.

It is 2 am. The fan rotates, the computer whines and whirs, and I tap at the keys. I am barely awake, clicking pictures, rewriting sentences, copying and pasting links and numbers. But then, I don’t really need to be awake. I am a Mechanical Turk, working for pennies and nickels that are only numbers inside this machine, meaningless in my day to day life. I will never jingle them in my pocket, so they build in this account, and I watch the numbers on my screen go up. And yet, in an obsessive way, it’s rewarding, tiny tasks completed one by one, helping people I’ll never meet. I become more like a machine every day.

I guess you could say that I’m obsessed with Mechanical Turk. I first found out about Mechanical Turk on msn.com. It sounded like the perfect hobby for me. I love to make extra money. I have a full-time job; but I like to do other things to make extra money. In addition to mechanical turk; I also sell things at flea markets and sell things on Ebay. I enjoy mechanical turk because I can perform tasks while watching televesion. I also sometimes work on hits during my lunch hour. You don’t make much money; but it’s a fun hobby. I especially enjoy the surveys. I feel like I am having a say in the world and that my voice is being heard. I also enjoy the editing hits. One of the additional reasons I enjoy mechanical turk is because I like to watch television on weeknights to relax after a long day of work. Working on mechanical turk while watching tv makes it seem like I’m not wasting my time. It’s fun and relaxing and you can work on it at your own pace. It also makes the commercials go by faster. I don’t know if I will continue to work on mechanical turk hits forever. At this point I don’t have any desire to stop. It’s fun and easy; and it keeps my mind sharp. I don’t make enough money to make that much of an impact on my life. I usually make around $39 every few weeks. But that’s enough to pay for a night out or a nice meal a few times a month.

I’m a college student, somewhere in the sweaty palm of Michigan, and a lazy one at that. One who scoffs at physical labor for making him break a sweat, but who is paradoxically willing to spend hours in front of a computer, doing work so repetitive that Phil Connors from Groundhog Day would vomit. A friend turned me on to turking; now I turk for a few hours a day. I like to make at least $1.00 a day, but there are those glorious occasions when an easy HIT pays greater than a third-world-country corporation. I guess I’ll continue to turk until I get that fancy piece of paper that entitles me to make more money. Turking has made me question my world. Who is it that pays people a few cents for things they could easily accomplish themselves? Someday, if I get rich enough through mturk, I’m going to pay homeless people to go stare at a mailbox, and then describe it to me in a dialog box. What I do with this data is irrelevant, and the homeless people would never be informed. That would signify that my life has come full circle. Perhaps my life will come full circle on the day I conceive a child in the same campus apartments that my parents conceived me in. I walk by those hollowed out apartments almost every day. I’ll have to act quick, for they’ll be demolished soon. Their HIT is about to expire, I guess. Hit submit! Hit submit!

I think that my story is similar to a lot of different turkers. I first started doing it because I read a story about Mechanical Turk online and thought it sounded interesting. Also, I was working a really easy office administrator job, where I practically never had any work to do. Basically I just sat in front of the computer all day and got paid to do nothing; checking facebook and reading numerous blogs actually gets old after awhile when you are in front of a computer for eight hours a day. Therefore I started doing HITs, and was really happy that I was able to make extra money while sitting and getting paid for my real job. It kept me from getting bored, and it’s really fun to see the money add up! Since first starting, I was laid-off from my job and now I am working a few part-time jobs. Whenever I can, I complete HITs just to keep earning a bit of extra money. I think it is fun, and it makes me feel more productive and worthwhile when I am just trying to waste time online. I really appreciate when requesters are quick and honest about making payments. I was scammed once; I completed a HIT for $1 and was almost immediately rejected for no apparent reason–I tried contacting the requester and never heard anything back. Stuff like that is really annoying. But, in general, I have had great experiences and I really enjoy turking!

I am not poor. I am not struggling with finances. I am not in between jobs. In fact I am a full time student with no debts. Then why am I completing HITs after HITs you ask? Well, the simple answer to that is who doesn’t like making some money? And this answer may satisfy most people but it isn’t the entire truth. I accidently came upon the idea of Mechanical Turking on one of the numerous articles on the web about making quick money. However, someone who is actually looking to make money will be disappointed, since most tasks don’t pay more than a few cents. However, since my main objective was not to make money but simply to satiate my curiosity I powered through. On my first day I looked around to discover that this thing was in fact legitimate. That is when I took a bigger bite. It may be surprising to think that someone who doesn’t need would immerse themselves in such repetitive and often frivolous tasks. But it is oddly refreshing. The tasks like filling out forms do not require you to think much and it gives your mind a break. For someone who likes to write it can even be quite fun. It may sound counterintuitive, but in fact working on HITs isn’t working for me at all. It is a kind of relaxation. The audios that I transcribe go from my ears though to my fingers to type. There isn’t much processing involved. And surprisingly some of the audio clips are very engaging. It has only been a month since I started on Mechanical Turk and it’s been an enjoyable time. And to my pleasant surprise, I have in fact amassed a lot of money. A lot because I am in fact getting paid to do essentially nothing, to be on my study breaks. How could this be a bad thing?

I am a trailing spouse, the wife of someone posted outside the United States and the mother of four small children. For various reasons, I am not able to work in my field at my current location. I have a part-time job, but it is not my life’s goal to continue in this line of work. One day, I was exploring a website about working from home when I happened to see a reference to Mechanical Turks. The site fascinated me–who are the people posting these tasks and why? Who is completing them? It seemed like there was a whole bizarre world invisible to everyone else who just uses Amazon to buy stuff or sell old books. I checked out the list of available hits and decided to try my hand at a few. I enjoy writing, so I have mainly concentrated on very quick writing-related tasks. So far I’ve written restaurant reviews, product reviews, posts for random websites, advice on topics I have some familiarity with, etc. I’ve also transcribed a few audio recordings and videos. These small jobs may not pay much, but at least I’m writing (sort of) and it’s a nice change of pace from playing games on Facebook, which is what I’d probably be doing otherwise. I do sometimes wonder why I went to grad school if this is what I spend the rest of my life doing, but usually I just enjoy spending fifteen minutes here or there writing, well, something like this.

I found out about Mechanical Turk through an article on a work-at-home website. While I was not expecting much from it, I have found that I’ve actually found a nice source of income for extra pocket money. If you’re looking to make a living based upon Mechanical Turk alone, you are probably in the wrong place. However, if you don’t mind whiling away a few extra minutes or hours here and there, and getting paid for it, you might have the perfect activity in Mturk. When I started , I only made a few dollars my first week and I felt a little bit discouraged. Then as I gradually began taking on more tasks and branching out, I earned more. Some of the tasks which pay the most money are transcription. I am trying to improve my transcription skills, and as I get faster I’ve been able to take on more difficult and better paying transcription jobs. So far this year, I’ve earned several hundred dollars on Mturk. I usually cash out half of the money(amazon allows you to transfer your money to a US bank account), and put the remainder into amazon gift cards. I’ve been able to purchase a flat screen computer monitor and buy many movies and books I have been wanting, but could not have otherwise afforded. Mturk has been great to me, for the “extras” in life. While I might not need them to survive, the extras make life a lot more fun!