Pennies and Nickels and Dimes, Oh My! During the latter months of 2008, in my quest for finding ways to make money online, I found Amazon Mechanical Turk. On my first day, I made about 34 cents. That wasn’t exactly a real motivator. Also, it looked like a lot of the HITs were beyond my scope, since I’m not very computer savvy and don’t know how to do really basic things that a lot of people have been doing for years. This limited what HITs I could accept, and consequently, how much money I could make. The idea of working for pennies was a little disheartening—well, a lot disheartening. But after a while, it began to add up. I have very ambivalent feelings about this. On one hand, it really is a virtual sweatshop, as they say. On the other hand, I’ve worked on some really interesting things from new cell phone apps to interactive classes on educational websites. I have gotten unfair rejections from unscrupulous requestors, and gotten bonuses occasionally because someone liked the job I did. I have to admit, those rejections really hurt. They hurt my pride, they hurt my feelings, and not least of all, they hurt my ever important approval rating. It takes so very many to increase the percentage, but only a few (a very few) to reduce it. Math can be so unfair sometimes! Last week I passed the $500 mark in earnings! Like I said before, it really does add up. When I see a HIT for twenty five cents, it’s like CHA-CHING! Now we’re talking some big bucks! Oh, to a non-turker, that might seem a little ridiculous. But once you do it for a while, you’re kind of hooked.