I'll take "Surveys" for $800...

While I am job hunting via the Internet, I happen upon lots of interesting websites and "opportunities" to make a little money. One of these is InboxDollars. I signed up and took an initial survey. I get paid (a small amount) just for opening e-mails from them. Mostly I turn down the "HUGE OPPORTUNITY" offers for things I don't use, don't want to use, and don't want to hear about. But I do like to click on "Take Surveys" to see if there is a survey for which I qualify and for which I can earn spare change.

The process is--click on "Take Survey" and a legal document pops up on your screen explaining everything you need to know and understand, and I think there is some extraneous material included about not cutting your toenails too short to avoid ingrown nails and helpful tips on how to keep bread fresh in hot and humid weather, but I must confess that I don't read every minute detail before "I Agree" to the terms and conditions. After being "agreeable", a video with a nice young lady appears on the screen and she lectures me about being honest in my answers. I am properly chastened and decide not to pretend that I am 25, making $500,000 a year, and living on the Riviera Coast. The next screen asks me a group of questions to determine if I am eligible for the available survey(s). Now here is where I have some concern. I can usually only check off one or two in the affirmative (these questions change daily depending on who wants to "know"). My checked off items are "I watch TV" and/or "I go to movies in the theater" (as opposed to the forest? a cave? Aunt Helen's barn?). Most of the time, the other questions, which I cannot honestly check off (thanks to Ms. Preachy Person) are--"Do you consume alchoholic beverages on a daily basis?", "Do you have children in your household under the age of 8", "Do you make most of the household buying decisions", etc. Well, if you are consuming alcoholic beverages on a daily basis, you might want to hire a sober babysitter for your children and avoid making any important decisions about purchases until you have had a chance to "sleep it off". Of course, none of the surveys are asking for my opinion on these kinds of situations, so I am relegated to the occasional survey about taking pain medication--a must after job hunting and/or survey taking, or one about what kind of floor cleaner I prefer (the kind that gets rid of dirt...easily and without rinsing, thank you).

I'm thinking I might put a survey on my blog about how to spend significant amounts of time on survey-taking websites without an appropriate return on investment (of time that is), but, my eyes are now so blurry and watery from all the hours I've spent checking out the available "surveys-of-the-day" and searching through hundreds of job postings, applying online to jobs that seemed promising even when the "apply online" procedure was less than user friendly--can you say "user hostile and confusing"? (Some links are missing, kind of like the Dr. Leaky issue, and by the time I try to cut and paste my resume to fit into their limited "space" I forget what the job is for which I am applying. I have also found that, after completing a lengthy application, I can not return to the page detailing the job without losing the application in the process, so I wing it and hope that what I write in my application has some relevance to the job.) And so I find that I can no longer see my monitor screen clearly. I love Monet and all those Impressionists but in a museum, not on my screen. If Van Gogh had lived in today's world and had to deal with the imperfections of websites and other related portals, he would probably have cut off his other ear! As for me, I'm cutting this off while I can still see well enough to exit the programs I have open....