Do the ChaCha!

The moment I broke $100 for the first time!

Preface:

So, when I worked at Highwood Place Apartments, I had a lot of downtime, and I was constantly looking for ways to fill it. I particularly looked for ways to fill my downtime and make money at the same time. My brother introduced me to Amazon Mechanical Turk, which would take another blog post to explain, but while participating on the forums for that website, I heard about ChaCha.

Back then, ChaCha was solely internet based, and the guides would work with people that were asking questions AT their computer…so the niche market that ChaCha had snatched was probably mostly old people who don’t know how to Google, and someone who had a really hard question that they just couldn’t find the answer to.

I applied. “We are not hiring at this time, but we’ll let you know when we have openings” was what I was told. I didn’t think too much of it, and went on with ‘Turking’.

It was at least 4 or 5 months before I received the invitation in the mail. ChaCha was starting a new service. textChaCha. It’s where people can text message ChaCha from their cell phones a question like “Where can I find the nearest Walgreens” or “What is the score of the Louisville vs. KY game?” and a guide will receive their ‘query’ on their computer, search the internet for the answer, and then send the answer back to them. I was all about this because it was supposed to take less commitment to each individual search. So I applied, took their tests, and passed. I was a guide. I ended up making about $56 guiding. Then I got tired of it. People would ask inappropriate questions, or I’d get a really hard question, and then the phone would ring at work, and I’d have to abort the search (a BIG no-no) and I just didn’t like that.

So I got an email about a month ago saying that ChaCha had come up with a new role besides being a Guide. It’s called the Expediter. The Expediter takes the original question, makes it a true question (so if someone says “walgreens, 40222″, I would change it to “Can you tell me where the nearest Walgreens is to the zip code 40222?”) and then categorizes the question. That one would go in Travel-Directions and traffic. I’d also select the specific location so that the Guide has an easy time finding the answer.

The difference is that I don’t actually have to FIND answers (phew!) and most of them take under 10 seconds. Now that’s still only about 5-7 dollars an hour, but hey…it pays the internet bill!

The Point (I know…it’s about time!):

Well, they only pay you by direct deposit without a fee (you can get paid whenever you want for a fee…) when you’ve reached the magic $100 benchmark, and only once a month do they make the payments. After I tested and was accepted to be an Expeditor, the goal was to reach 100 by Sept 15th so that I could get paid. Up until now, I had never even been paid the $56 I made while I was a guide. For all I knew, I’d never see that money. Well, I made it to $100 on Sept 13th, and today I checked my bank statement. Guess what was there! $101.84!

My free advertisement for ChaCha:

Now, just in case you’re wondering, ChaCha is a free service. You only have to pay for the text messages, so if you have unlimited texting, then it’s totally free. If you’re ever out looking for something or need a phone number for something and don’t have access to the internet, Text your questions to CHACHA (242242) and a guide will send you back the answer. It’s all ad supported, so that’s how they make their money. Oh, and if you’re bored, you can ask for a joke and a guide will send one. If you just want someone to text, you can just strike a conversation with a random guide (it’ll be a different guide every time you text, though). So, Do the ChaCha!