Today I Learned That ...There's No Helping Some People

I have an acquaintance who is down on her luck. Has no job - and apparently cant' keep any job that she does get. Can't pay her rent and can't get any help to pay her rent until she gets a job.

So, I told her about Textbroker.com.  If you're a good writer, you can make money at this site. It's nicer than Elance because you don't have to bid on jobs and wait until you're chosen - the work is there, waiting for you. A single article doesn't pay a lot. It pays peanuts, frankly. But if you sit on your couch all day watching TV, why not watch TV and write at the same time! Make $40 a day or so, and at the end of a month it all adds up.

We were at the library. (She had a computer at home but it was in the shop.)

Well, first she had to set up a Paypal account.Textbroker pays via Paypal. (And they are a legitimate site, by the way, I've worked for them for many years.) Paypal asks for an email. This woman didn't want to use her current email account, so she created a new one. With a new password. I told her to write down her password, and apparently she did so. She didn't choose one that was easy to remember, that's all I can tell you.

Then she set up her Textbroker account, and chose a *different* password. Again, one not easy to remember. I told her to write down that password, too, and she did so.

So then she had to write a 200 word sample article. After five days or so Textbroker would get back to her.

That was Friday.

On Monday, she couldn't get on to either site so I came into town (I live 15 miles away) and helped her with that. For some reason she hadn't brought the sheet of paper on which she'd written her emails. So she changed the password on  one of them...then I had to take her to a coffee shop to get a job application, then we went to her apartment so she could get the paper on which her passwords were written,..and she could get into Textbrokerto see if she'd been approved to start writing yet. She hadn't. (But she wrote a good article, I know because I helped her with it.)

Now, she's emailing me (I don't talk on the phone) saying her passwords for Gmail and Textbroker don't work. (She'd had her computer in to get fixed, it's back now.)

Well, I'll try to help her tomorrow, but I think she's a lost cause... I mean I seriously doubt that within the space of two days someone would have hacked both a brand new gmail account and a brand new Textbroker account. Especially when each password was one that had letters and a gazzilion numbers (I couldn't see *what* she was typing when she did her passwords, but I could see *where* on the keyboard she was typing.).

I'm wondering if she's deliberately sabotaging herself for some psychological reason...