How to earn $40 in 5 minutes.

[temporus]

Apparently, not everything in life is a scam.   I get a lot of offers to fill out surveys, survey for this, for that, for all kinds of things.   Often, there is a reward promised, though with a disclaimer along the lines of:  Free ### for the first 200 people who fill out our survey.  Normally, I dismiss this kind of thing as just plain BS.  Nothing more than an attempt to add urgency for a request for feedback.   However, not too long after returning from the VMWorld conference, I was sent just such an email.  It offered $40 gift certificate to Amazon.com for the first few hundred respondents.   I don't know why, but I got the email, and decided to just fill it out.   I had a few opinions, and figured I might as well share them.   What are the odds I would actually get through the survey in time to be one of the first few hundred.

Apparently, those odds were better than I thought.

I had assumed that I hadn't won, because I didn't hear back.  Well, it's about two months later, and I heard back.   And now I have to decide what to buy with it.

I guess from now on, I'll take the time to fill out a few more surveys here and there, and promptly.  I probably won't win all the time, but who knows?  Besides, that's more books I can buy. I guess I'm saying: if you get an email from a reliable source, like a training class you attended, or a convention, or a business, it doesn't really hurt to take 5 minutes, and respond, right then and there.  You might find it was worth your time after all.