It was a slow Sunday morning at home,my wife and I were just hanging out when the talk turned to Mothers Day.The day in question was only about a week away and did I have any plans,twenty four years of marriage had trained me to pickup on hints like that.Twenty four years had yet to train me in quick insightful responses.Putting on what I hoped was a thoughtful face,I paused,paused some more and said I didn’t but was open to suggestions.Now I’ve seen the resulting look on her face before,actually quite often.In the language of nonverbal communication it goes something like this,“your an idiot and if it wasn’t for killing spiders and removing half eaten mice our cats bring in I’d boot your sorry ass”.Then there was a pause then she smiled,a smile following ‘the look’ has seldom been a good thing in our house if you don’t believe me ask my boys if you ever meet them.You know honey this also the year of our twenty fifth wedding anniversary she said.I have at this point hear nothing,birds,trucks,TV,nothing,where is this going and what is it going to cost.She continued by reminding me of a couple of years ago that we had gone to Yosemite National Park and had a lot of fun.This was true and our youngest son is now old enough to stay home.Stirrings were happening in me that had not been so stirred since I couldn’t remember when.So we both ditched work the week of Mothers day and I went to Yosemite with the girl I love.

Well David Cassidy was plastered from top to bottom all over my bedroom walls, my record shelf was full of all his songs including cherish, how can i be sure etc, the partridge family i watched with awe glued to every scene, a member of his fan club i finally was able to get my hands on two tickets to his Wembley London concert. The day had arrived my dad drove me and a girlfriend to London for the day of my life. When we arrived the area was jam packed with fans waiting to see their idle. The concert we saw was the afternoon session, me and my friend made our way to the auditorium and took our seats. David ran onto the stage the arena filled with screaming crying girls David David everyone screamed the atmosphere was electric. The first song was rock me baby, we stood up screaming you could hardly hear the song. My seat was half way up from the stage and i had a clear view, songs he sang including daydreamer, i think i love you the auditorium went crazy. Nearly two hours of David in real life it was amazing. When the concert had finished we ran outside with the rest of the fans round the back where it was fenced off. The fans shaking the fence screaming David`s name it was crazy. My dad found us and told us to stop it, he had gone and it was time to go home we made our way back to the car and home, a day i will never forget.

I am a Mechanical Turker. Admittedly, I was a little skeptical about making money on the Internet; one can be so easily scammed these days, but when a trusted friend told me about the site I decided to check it out. This is such a great way to make a little bit of extra money in one’s spare time. I have been able to make enough money to buy some of my textbooks already, and I am looking forward to being able to supplement my income to allow me to go out to eat more or just have fun. Some skill-building is involved in the process, which I enjoy. Instead of being mind-numbingly boring work, I feel like I am building up some skills that I didn’t have before such as being able to creatively answer a question in a short amount of time. I find that I am able to weed out the information that I do not need from the information that I do need a little faster since beginning this. Also, I can use all the free time I was wasting before to put a little money in my pocket. I’ll admit that I haven’t told many people about it. Being a little selfish I don’t want all the good hits to be taken up so fast! Any of my friends, though, that I think would benefit from the extra money I tell. I’m not completely selfish.

I’m currently a college student. By the time I came back from college, all of the seasonal summer jobs were taken. I have noticed that it’s been pretty hard for my fellow classmates to find jobs as well. It did not help that I was not in the area to apply for jobs early on. I also had the disadvantage of no prior work experience and no connections that would refer me to job openings. Thus, I started to look for ways to make money online. I had tried various money-making programs before, but that was a while ago and it was tedious work. So, recently my brother and I were discussing the different money-making programs we were in, and he had mentioned MTurk. I researched more about it, and decided to join. MTurk seems to have been pretty good to me so far. I previously was trying to obtain simple data entry and similar administrative job tasks through an online marketplace. However, I would just waste time searching for job postings and writing cover letters that would just result in rejection. I really like MTurk because you know the amount you are making, and you do not waste much time. I especially like the simple data entry HITs. The most interesting HIT I have experienced was probably this study which involved a memory game. There were eight or so object images – all of which were objects that were not something that has a common name, but had different colors and other descriptive characteristics – and they would associate random words – some which I did not think were even in the dictionary – with a certain image, and you would have to try to remember which image each word was associated with. The most frustrating one was probably an audio transcription. I thought it would be easy because English has been my first language since I was a baby, and I type faster than your average person does. However, it was much harder than it seemed. Overall, I have really enjoyed my time here at MTurk, and continue to do HITs over the summer, and maybe during the school year if I have time. But I guess that’s what also is great about MTurk – you can choose when you work.

Not only are employees at companies around the world being affected by the current economic crisis, but so are graduate students! I’m a graduate student at a prestigious University, who lost his stipend money when the project he was working on was cut. I have to finish the project in order to get my degree, but I no longer have any sort of income! Thus, I find myself doing anything I can to make money, be it doing these HITs online or psychology studies or medical studies. I hope the economy improves soon, so that other graduate students aren’t forced to deal with the same hardships I have been forced to overcome to get my degree.

Times are tough. Everyone I know is struggling. Those with good jobs are keeping their heads above water; those with jobs that are having their hours cut are sinking beneath the high costs of housing, energy and food. We are walking in a depression and don’t even know it. The American gloom is pervasive and my friends don’t know why they can’t get happy. There’s just not enough to go around. I’m one of those sinking. Catching every bit of income that I can. Hoping nothing “comes up” that would put another hole in my carefully maintained financial dike. When I accepted that my family might be going down this time, that I might not be able to save our home, our lifestyle, I felt my life open up a little. Make alternate plans, and hold on as long as possible and keep on keeping on. On the radio, driving home, I heard a spot on NPR about turking. A man who had lost his job talked about how he sat for hours playing computer games until he found mechanical turk. Now he turks for ridiculously small amounts of money, but it is something more than playing games. I think he said he makes about $125 a month. Well, I, too, lose myself in the mindlessness of computer games when I get home at night. It’s a way not to think, and even win. So I started turking instead of playing Tetris and Text Twist. I am fascinated how seriously I take this. There are HITs I’m not qualified to do and HITs that ask me to do things on the computer that are simply gibberish to me. I get crazy when I’m rejected and ruin my percentage so I find some quick and easy penny HITs to drive up my average. The main thing I want to say is, why can’t there be a place like this that actually offers the chance of making five or seven or ten dollars an hour? A place where some of these real clerical jobs, performed for a penny or a nickel, could be done for a quarter and moms and dads and singles and jobless teens and retirees and all of us Americans could actually make turking into the wad of gum that patches the hole in the dike. I did this HIT even though it is late, because it pays a quarter. And I appreciate that. Keep on Turkin’ and stay well.

I’ve a good job, good friends a decent car and I’ve been in debt for the past few years, every time I’ve been about to get out of debt, something happens and I stay in the same situation, so, usually, I’ve little to no money to spend on my hobbies, which is kind of sad. About six months ago, I was reading a blog about my hobby and read how the author was buying all this stuff from money he was getting from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I started researching about it, learned how it wasn’t a scam and how many people where able to buy so much stuff without doing hard work, just filling surveys, answering questions and doing a bit of research, all of which I did in my spare time anyway, so I signed up, and in my first month I made about one hundred and fifty dollars, and it was all spent on my hobby, it felt good, since I wasn’t “wasting” salary, so I kept doing it, every day a few minutes here and there, I was able to get about four hundred dollars and a lot of new stuff thanks to this, I was even able to buy gifts for friends and family without having to actually spend money on them. I was hooked. After a while, I had to take some time off, and started turking less often, right now, I’m starting to come back to it, I want some extra stuff and I know I can get the money I need by doing these HITs, probably in a few months, I’ll burn up again and I’ll have to take a few weeks off, sometimes, I feel that Mechanical Turk is becoming more and more a second job.

I am a stay at home mom trying to keep a family together, contribute financially to them and the economy and stay sane in these tough times! I am not anything special, just a regular person trying to contribute, raise happy good children and have people remember me fondly. It’s been said that everyone brings joy, some when they enter a room and others when they leave, I want to be the one bringing joy when I enter not when I leave. I am the daughter of teachers, big sister of two brothers, mom to three little girls and wife to a great guy. We live quiet lives in the suburbs of Cleveland, vote (big democrats), contribute to charities and attend church. My husband is Catholic, I am Protestant but really more spiritual than anything else. I love dogs, kids, traveling, learning and being happy. I want to do what I can to make the world kinder, safer and more peaceful for my family and human beings everywhere. We all count and should stand together to accoomplish this!

My wife and I are always on the lookout for innovative ways to make money. We’ve just had a baby girl and coordinating someone to watch the baby while we’re at work is sometimes an impossible task. Even though our jobs are staggered shifts, there are time when I need to leave work to cover an unexpected shift change my wife has. I’ve been looking for ways to work at home so that I can be home to care for the baby. A couple weeks ago, my wife heard a radio story on NPR about Mechanical Turk. I researched it and decided to give it a try, even though it wasn’t the final solution. The small earning will not allow me to leave my primary job, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that simply working HITs during down times at home, (like Sunday night when the wife is at work and I’ve just put the baby to bed), would at least provide some cash for a dinner out or a gift for a special occasion. The other thing I’m finding out is the addictive nature of Mechanical Turk. I can’t stop finding excuses to logon and grab some HITs. I feel like I’m doing something productive rather than blowing time playing a video game. There is an unexpected education to the process as well with the certification processes and the way one begins to think differently about how information and images are laid out in our day-to-day living.

My husband’s contracting company went belly-up in the housing crisis and health issues forced me to change jobs to one where I have no health insurance. I’ve always been a great reader, as well as a great packrat, so I decided to sell some of the 1000+ books I had accumulated over the years and would never read again on amazon. On amazon’s site, I saw a side listing for Mechanical Turk and have been doing hits for a few months now. Sometimes I’m lucky and get the $1.00 jobs with multiple hits available. Sometimes there are no high paying jobs that I feel I can do, and then I do some of the lower paying ones. I love the survey hits and also writing travel articles and movie synopses. Actually, some of the really low paying jobs are the most interesting. When I first started, I did hits for like 2 cents that were transcribing old, old immigration records and 19th century handwritten diaries. The money adds up slowly but surely. Because of the way our income has fallen off so drastically, there are times when we actually need $20 to get by on food till payday, and it’s nice to know I can just grab it from my MTurk account and have it transferred to my bank account quickly. Before MTurk, I spent my computer time playing solitaire - this is definitely more profitable and interesting!