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.