So your Mechanical Turk application went through. You applied and somehow, it was accepted and you received the invitation. You kept your fingers crossed while Amazon Payments verified your bank account. You used your time wisely (you thought), browsing the available HITs, requesting qualifications, wondering about this mysterious and elusive “masters” qualification that seems to appear on almost every HIT, and reading the instructions for the HITs you do already qualify for so that when you’re ready, you could start banging them out.

Day 1

And that moment did indeed arrive. You got into a rhythm drawing those bounding boxes and tagging those images, it was almost as if the HITs completed themselves after a while. Before you knew it, you’d reached limit of 100 HITs accepted for the day. You’re feeling such a sense of accomplishment, you don’t even care that you only made less than a dollar in three hours. They say that the more HITs you have approved, the more higher paying ones you qualify for! So it makes sense to do these easy, low-paying ones in the beginning because it will open up bigger and better things faster. And once you have 1000 approved, you won’t go *near* those penny batches ever again.

Famous last words.

Day 2

This is the day you’re going to try some surveys. You are going to start off with surveys and see if you can max out on them, after all, it was so easy to max out on those batches where you draw 20 or more bounding boxes for a penny. For sure, there have got to be surveys that pay ten times as much for a tenth of the work. Today, you are going to start working smarter, not harder. Maybe even join a forum and try installing some scripts.

>RECORD SCRATCH<

We interrupt your regularly scheduled soliloquy to inform you that while you were sleeping, ScamCam has rejected 43 of the 60 HITs you submitted, and the rest are still pending and will probably also be rejected. You also did a bunch of HITs for BrokenHITs-R-Us, and even though you followed the instructions, received a completion code, and were able to submit the HITs, they couldn’t match your mturk ID with any of the completion codes, so if you could tell them how they can reverse the rejections without having to pay you, they would be happy to let you do all the HITs again.

Does this ever happen to you?

If so, you’ve come to the right place. Better late than never!

To be continued…