Thing 3: Stress Savers

Three sites were offered for this assignment (Thing #67) on ExploreDiscoverPlay's website (http://explorediscoverplay.blogspot.com/). The idea behind these is to provide a shortcut to information that would take stress out of your everyday life.

The first one was Dial A Human (http://www.dialahuman.com/). This site gives you well-known or popular companies' phone links that will put you in touch with a human being instead of a phone tree. The assignment called for checking out how many companies you use and if it would be a benefit. Here are the companies I found that I've used or still use:
AAA, AOL, Amazon, banks, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, FedEx, FTD, mortgage companies, Hilton HHonors, health plan organizations, Ikea, JCPenney, LLBean, Napster, PayPal, Office Depot, Student Loans (anyone out there??), Southwest, T-Mobile, UPS, and many U.S. Departments.
Some of the phone numbers took you straight to human beings, while others required a series of keys you had to press on your phone.
I found this helpful, but probably not something I'd use every day. Maybe out of frustration.

The next site, Custom Guide (www.customguide.com/computer-training/quick-references),
proved more useful. It had free printable reference or cheatsheets to be used with computers. They included 2010 versions of Excel, Office, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Word. Each sheet included an embedded screenshot, short cuts, and fundamentals. Other areas were particular to whichever program you were using. I intend to download these and place them in a notebook. They are very much like the cheatsheets you can buy at bookstores, except they aren't laminated.

The third and last site was Where is Your Username? (www.usernamecheck.com/) It checks the top 20 social networks to find out if your favorite username is available for your use. If you find any that you'd like to reserve strictly for yourself, 'just' pay a $99 reservation fee. I checked for my first name. The results showed that none of the networks had my name available for use. Sixteen were taken and four were unknowns. None of them were restricted. I did recognize some of the sites that I use, which accounted for why my username was taken there. For example, both Blogger and Wordpress had my name being used. However, I don't know who has my name with YouTube and others that were listed. This was interesting, but I don't feel a reservation of my name necessary, especially at the $99 cost. I can see where it'd be important for a company, but not for me.

Of the three of these, I found the cheatsheets most useful and could see them as an asset on my job as a quick reference whenever I'm in the middle of creating a project for the library.