Malfunctioning Turk

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a great way to cure burnout from your day job.

I’ve been awake far too long (haven’t slept since… I don’t know when), and was waiting for a return business call. Decided on a whim that I’m growing ever more tired of IT work. I’d like to get rich quick and GTFO of the industry, to be honest. Then again, wouldn’t we all like to get rich quick and retire before we’re 30? Well, I keep hearing (usually from late night infomercials) that people are making bajillions of dollars on these here Internets. So a quick Google(tm) search later, and I was off on what seemed to be a potential scheme. Mechanical Turk. Promising crazy micropayment jobs such as data verification and transcribing images to text, it sounded like an awesome idea to fund my future pirate ship. I have two eyes, and I type fast, after all.

Okay, so I didn’t sign up actually expecting to get rich, or expecting to generate any money whatsoever. Seriously – get rich quick on the Internet? Only if you buy a domain name that’s suitable for hosting images of cats in compromising positions.

Anyway, Turk’s filled with hilariously bad jobs for the most part – anything worth doing, in terms of sanity, is completely absurd from an income standpoint. Anything that pays well? It’s all ‘sign up for our spam’ crap. Suddenly dawns on me, I could just create a spam-specific e-mail account, route it to /dev/null, and, well – I throw out my junk mail anyway. I’d feel bad for the slaughter of the ten thousand trees that would surely fill my mailbox though; pretty much all the “high” paying jobs want mailing addresses for some reason.

Let me quote something from Amazon, here.

As a Mechanical Turk Worker you:

…If your home is a third world country; if you’re happy to work 23 hours a day, and if you have the skills to understand incomprehensible requests, certainly – I’m sure you can make a living off the Turk.

If you live in a first world country, don’t quit your day job.

(Wonder if I’m going to have to claim that $0.03 on taxes next year.)