Ya girl is always on the lookout for a cool side hustle. The less "overhead" the better. I have my little Etsy Shop which is the epitome of Passive Income. And here lately, since I'd consider myself somewhat Tech Savvy, I've also registered over at Rev.com to be a "Closed Caption-er" for training videos and YouTube, etc. (hello, side gig while I'm on [hopeful] Maternity Leave!) From my research, there is apparently a pretty long waitlist to get selected, but I'm not quitting my 9 to 5, so I'm totally cool with the wait. If it comes sooner than later, even better! The test sample and quiz they gave you was pretty fun, too!
After you take a few different series of quizzes:
[grammar: is it "should have been checked.." or "should of been checked..." type questions]
[spelling and correct usage "there doesn't seem to be..." or "their doesn't seem to be..."]
[punctuation: "in the United States of America, taxes can be murder..." or "in the united states of america, taxes can be murder..."]
Then you transition into how their online Captioning Software works (VERY easy) and you have a practice video to caption. There are a few rules, like:
- using the ^ to shift your captions to the top if there is words on the screen, so they don't overlap.
- Typing exactly what the people are saying, but making sure to follow proper sentence breaking - in accordance to their 60 character per line rule. (Thanks for priming me, Twitter.) This simply means hitting enter to give a proper noun it's own line, instead of breaking it apart.
- then syncing the line breaks up to keep pace with the conversation on the screen.
- downside was that people talk frickin fast, man. Like, I had to keep rewinding in order to make sure I was catching it all. Again, this is common, so the [TAB] button skips back 10 seconds.
Once you get to the end of the video with typing, you hit [NEXT] and it takes you to an identical screen but now the interface is geared for Syncing, instead of typing.
Syncing part was supper easy. You click on a line of text that you typed out, and drag it to the "Timeline" that scrolls along with the video. You then drop the line of text at the 2 second mark (or the 6 second mark, wherever it syncs up) and then proceed to grab the next box of text as the conversation continues on. If you need to tweak it, just left click+hold and scootch it forward or back to where it needs to me. You can also slow the video down however much you need too.
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My other gig that really interested me: AmazonFlex - Veho - Shipt style delivery services. I haven't had a chance to write about it, but Otter and I have been doing HelloFresh since April, and WE LOVE IT. All our HelloFresh boxes are delivered by Veho.
So, its Independent Contractor (W-9) and there is freedom with picking your hours - meaning I can walk out of Real Job and open the app and click on "I'm Available Now!" and proceed to go pick up my deliveries (with Veho, its 95% HelloFresh boxes, LOVE IT). Since I generally get out of work by 3:30pm everyday, there's plenty of opportunity for me to go make a 3-4 hour delivery and make some nice extra cash, same day as my Real Job. The reason is 2-fold. Otter works from home now... and I get it - 3:30 is really early for a lot of people to be done with work. So, he's usually only about halfway done with his day when I get there. I can just come at this as a paid hobby. It keeps me out of the house, I'm not wasting money by needlessly shopping (my go-to) and I'm literally getting paid for it.
You get to pick your delivery area, which can be close to the warehouse for pickup or close to your house - or wherever the hell you want to go (some suburbs/rural/ farther away spots have a higher pay rate). You see the rate of pay per delivery route at Sign-Up, so you already know how much you will make that day.
I am registered, everything is accepted, I am just waiting for my background to clear, and that will come with the App Registration code, to build my Driver profile and to set my direct deposit (etc). From start to accepted, less than a week (I submitted on a Thursday or Friday and had to wait the weekend). Fingers crossed!