How many synonyms can you name for the word “broke”? Here are a few: unemployed; poor; desperate; discouraged. Yep. Being a displaced housewife after raising the kids is not financially healthy in this economy. Even when I worked at a bookstore (now closed), I didn’t quite make enough money to pay the bills. So, I started trying to make a little extra cash through MTurk. It was a great disappointment; it often pays tiny, tiny amounts of money for huge amounts of work, especially the transcribing. Finally I realized that as a job, MTurk is next to useless, time-consuming and practically non-paying. However, as a cynical hobby, it allows me to make a few cents while trying to figure out how much longer we have until third-world-country status hits us all. I laugh with my friends who play with MTurk about how “much” money we’ve earned any particular day. We’re all very careful not to download anything or to divulge personal information (although I have received emails from MTurk employers who were subsequently banned from MTurk). My respect for Amazon has diminished considerably since I’ve been working with MTurk, but I still buy books from Amazon. I now categorize Amazon with other large greedy corporations, but take my pennies anyway, because a few cents are better than none and as long as I don’t considerate this a viable source of income it is amusing. I do, however, think that Amazon could probably arrange to pay slightly more money to Turkers.