Driven into a near-frenzy of boredom by bedrest, I decided to make an attempt to contribute to my family's income. After all, my screen is constantly being peppered by "work from home!" ads. My favorite is that one, "Learn how a single mother made 120.00 an hour!" Could that be me?!?! Doubtful. Let's be fair, here: if get-rich-quick schemes really worked that well we as a country would be seeing inflation rates into the thousand percents.
But I assumed that a few dollars an hour was reasonable; after all, I'm at least arguably literate, I have a Bachelor's in Psychology, and I type upwards of 70 wpm...surely there's something I could do to work from home!
That's how I found mechanical turk, amazon.com's answer to the work-at-home problem. I thought I'd love it: it's affiliated with amazon, one of my favorite companies, and you get paid directly into your amazon account for use on future purchases! Hooray! Since I buy pretty much every diaper to touch my son's bum on a quarterly sale from amazon, (haha, UPS guy!) this allows me to stock up on necessities just as though I'd bought them with real money.
However, after grinding away at mechanical turk, diligently, for two hours, what did I have to show for myself? About three bucks. Total. Even that would have been a welcome reprieve from the black hole of Youtube videos that would otherwise have taken up that time if it weren't for the constant war I had to wage against scammers.
See, the way mechanical turk works, in theory, is that businesses pay for you to perform micro-tasks for them. The idea is that, rather than paying one person to put in 300 minutes' worth of work, and pay them the normal rate for it, businesses can hire 300 people to do one minute's worth of work, and pay them next to nothing. For instance, I once spent around ten minutes rating the crack-iness of cracks in sidewalks that users had submitted pictures of to some website. Rather than waste tedious hours sorting the images themselves, the owners paid mechanical turkers to do it for them at an abysmal rate of $.05 per group of ten. Considering that each image had to be rated in several categories, including adding up the total lengths of all the cracks and guessing how long that crack would be compared to the width of the picture itself (relevance?) this "simple" task ended up taking around 3 minutes. Not long, but 3 minutes' work for $.05 comes to a whopping $1.00 an hour. Nobody's going to work for that kind of nothing, but a hundred people might be willing to sacrifice a couple of minutes for a nickel.
There are tasks that pay higher rates, like $2-$3 a pop, for jobs that sound legitimate. "Test our website," is a popular one, that asks you to fill in forms to "make sure they work." These tasks will almost always make some claim that they're "testing to make sure our system can screen out false data," followed by the request, "So provide your real information." Ha. Really? Let's think through that nugget of wisdom logically: if I were trying to make sure that my lie detector could test for liars, would I instruct every tester to speak nothing but the truth? No. Even if it correctly told me every time one of them was being truthful, I wouldn't know anything at all about its effectiveness, since part of being a detector is being able to distinguish between the two.
Follow one of these links to the website and you'll find yourself filling out offers for "OMG!!! FREE IPAD!" or something similar. Having your voicemail, inbox, and physical mailbox flooded with spam for the next decade=SOOOOOO not worth $3.00.
To make matters worse, Eric was at work the entire time that I was dodging spam bombs and sorting cracks for nickels, which meant that he earned the same amount as I did after about 15 minutes. All in all: next time I buy diapers they'll cost about a penny less per diaper thanks to my two hours of work, and now I feel even less contributory to the family than I did before.
Lesson to be learned: not all work-at-home gigs are scams, but for my time, I'd rather have a job.
If anyone needs me I'll be blurring the next two months into oblivion on Youtube.
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