When has instant access to information saved you?

August 12, 2009 3:50 AM

When has instant access to information saved you?

I'm interested in stories from people who have been saved from terrible situations because of instant access to information, particularly online information from a mobile device.

Whether it be looking up someone's name on a social networking site, or something better, how has instant access to information ever saved you?

posted by devnull to computers & internet (21 comments total)

1. Spilt blue ink all over my white shirt. Instant access saved me.
2. IPOD froze up in the middle of nowhere. Instant access saved me.
3. Walking down a dodgy looking street, decided to look it up -- murder capital of the city. Instant access (probably) saved me.

Glory be to instant access.
posted by gadha at 3:54 AM on August 12

Maps on my blackberry when I got on the wrong highway in an unfamiliar city.
posted by cathoo at 4:00 AM on August 12 [1 favorite]

Instant, relatively realtime bank information on my phone means I make significantly fewer stupid impulse purchases.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 4:16 AM on August 12 [1 favorite]

At the pub quiz playing for a bottle of cognac. Thanks google on 3G!

Seriously though, instant access helped greatly when arrived in Paris on one of the last flights in for the night.

I decided to take the metro and ended up getting off on the wrong station, thinking the hotel was around the corner. Grabbed a taxi and drove around for 20 minutes before getting on the 3G and GPS using google maps was able to get to the right place without driving around for hours.
posted by Funmonkey1 at 4:17 AM on August 12

Seconding maps. Needed to find the location of a small hotel in Orly, France on the fly. Was very helpful when lack of tourist information booths and language skills saved a desperate situation. Made it just before the battery ran out of the phone.
posted by slyrabbit at 4:17 AM on August 12

Nth maps in strange places.
posted by bigmusic at 5:05 AM on August 12

...saved from terrible situations

It says something about our spoiled society that the answers so far are minor conveniences, not "saving" from terrible situations.

Are you looking for examples of using things more like this, devnull?
posted by rokusan at 5:29 AM on August 12

Phone interviews. When I had applied for jobs at numerous organizations in a variety of fields, it was vital that I tracked the job descriptions and name of people I was talking to, so that when someone called, I could immediately pull up the info and speak coherently about how I fit what they were looking for and what I thought of the company/org.
posted by JannaK at 5:42 AM on August 12

"It says something about our spoiled society that the answers so far are minor conveniences, not "saving" from terrible situations."

What. A. Joke.

Being in a strange place at a strange time does indeed make for a desperate situation and would venture the consequences can be severe. If I changed what happened to me from Paris to Newark or some random dire part of LA, I highly doubt such a strong rebuke would be made by the earlier commentator.

All in all, mobile technology does make a great difference. For example, in NJ a woman was able to phone the police while being attacked recently (dailyrecord.com) and there are numerous other examples world wide of how mobile technology has thwarted what would be the most insidious of circumstances without instant access.
posted by Funmonkey1 at 6:28 AM on August 12

I work in IT. Saving the day with instant access to documentation, patches, knowledge bases, wikipedia, on-line forums, and live technical chats with other IT professionals is an every day occurrence.
posted by anti social order at 6:34 AM on August 12

Google, Google Books, JSTOR, SSRN, Newspaper Source and various other archives and data banks that are freely accessible online have VASTLY streamlined my copyediting and fact-checking work. I'm working on one book in particular that is so full of mistakes of all stripes that I truly believe it would not have been possible to edit without instant access to all this information. No more waiting for interlibrary loans, traveling to various libraries, or hunting down obscure reference material by haunting the library reference room and used bookstores.

Does it "save" me? Not in terms of ensuring my imminent survival, but it saves me a hell of a lot of time and (literal) legwork.
posted by scratch at 6:38 AM on August 12 [1 favorite]

Maybe it's a matter of question clarity, but I didn't read "saved you" and "saved you an hour" as the same thing at all.

(1) Thwarting an attack: saved.
(2) Finding an emergency procedure in a life-saving situation: saved.
(3) Finding a drug contraindication to save poisoning yourself or others: saved.
(4) "I got off at the wrong train station and had to drive around and also my hair got messed up in the wind.": handy convenience.

Heart surgery vs. a broken fingernail.

If the question is just "saved you some time", one might as well just make a list of the 300 Blackberry/iPhone/Palm features list.
posted by rokusan at 6:48 AM on August 12

A quick symptom lookup the morning I woke up with an awful headache and neckache were enough to convince me that a visit to the doctor was in order. Five days' hospital stay later, general consensus was that moving quickly probably prevented brain damage from the meningitis.

Less dramatically, I've also pretty much stopped buying stuff at Best Buy, because every time I'm at the mall and tempted to buy something, 10 seconds of research is usually enough to determine that the same thing is on sale at Amazon for 2/3 the price.
posted by Mayor West at 7:06 AM on August 12

Oh God, a billion and one times. From quickly answering stupid questions to finding the exact quotation or source document I needed to have *now* before a talk to never! getting! lost! in a strange city.

More exact story from a friend who has to be in a lot of strange places without a car: "My smartphone has saved me cab fare cause I can point out a better route/tell when I'm being driven in circles."
posted by The Whelk at 7:10 AM on August 12

Oh! Being able to instantly find someone's e-mail or phone number and then instantly send them a message has saved my ass so many times. If you put on events or do anything with a large number of people it's a huge godsend ..cause not only can you get to them, you can get to people who might know where the hell they are..and so much faster and on the run.
posted by The Whelk at 7:12 AM on August 12

About to board a flight from London to Edinburgh didnt know that recent change in rules meant I needed a photo ID. Instead of missing my flight I was able to login to my yahoo account, pull up a copy of my passport from my sent emails and sent it to the airline desk in the booth next to the internet cafe and I was allowed to board the flight.
posted by london302 at 8:32 AM on August 12 [1 favorite]

I had a bug buzz my ear whilst sitting outside one day a year or two ago. I thought nothing of it.

Then, 20 minutes later I hear a deafening rustling in the same ear---the bug was in it. Like, all the way. I began to panic a little bit--do I stick something in there? But then I risk pushing it in further, or killing it and having a rotting bug in my ear.

Luckily, Mrs. Fedor calmly googled "bug in ear" and the answer popped up immediately. Pour warm water into the ear, the bug will float out.

And it did. Feels good to live in the future sometimes.
posted by Darth Fedor at 8:35 AM on August 12 [2 favorites]

I had a terrible toothache one night (had never had a toothache, horrible, horrible pain branching through my head) and a google search quickly sussed out a solution. Use Listerine! Swish in mouth! Pain gone!(for about 30 minutes at a time). I was able to sleep that night and the following nights by keeping a bottle of green Listerine by my bed and taking a haul off it every 30 minutes or so.

The internet saved me from cutting my own head off.
posted by Grlnxtdr at 9:06 AM on August 12

I'm not sure if this is a valid answer to your question, but as a full-time programmer, I'd say the Internet saves my ass several times a day. But I don't think of it as "saving my ass." I think of it as "business as usual." Does a carpenter think, "Man! This hammer saves my ass! What would I do without it?"

Nowadays, programming involves "knowing" an endless amount of arcane stuff. "Knowing" is in quotes, because only a small part of "my" knowledge is in my head. I may be expected to hook my code up to some random service or database that just came into existence this week. And I'm not allowed to take several days to go to the library and research it. I'm continually expected to find whatever info I need NOW and get on with it. So I'm basically plugged into the web all day.

Like many people here, I use the web to buy most of what I buy, find contact info for people and businesses, download media, look at maps, etc. The web saves my ass over and over without me even knowing it. Countless times I've had medical symptoms and (for better or worse) have been able to diagnose myself online.

My first WOW moment with online maps was when I was staying in a hotel in a strange city. I was hungry and so I looked up a place to eat. I then pulled up the address on Google maps, but my brain couldn't make sense of the tangle of streets. So I switched to satellite view and saw a huge building. I looked out of my hotel window and saw that same huge building. That allowed me to completely orient myself.

At least twice a week, imdb saves me from going insane. What the fuck is that actor's name??? Oh, right.
posted by grumblebee at 9:44 AM on August 12

Earlier this week I was cleaning out a blocked drain with sulfuric acid and noticed the smell getting worse and worse... I googled "sulfuric acid fume inhalation" and realized if I didn't open all the windows QUICK I might pass out or suffer minor stuff, like tooth erosion and skin inflammation around my mouth, so I opened everything and carried my laptop into the far corner of the house with a gas mask and goggles on.

An hour later, everything was fine. I had read the instructions and followed them to the letter, but didn't know if I was supposed to be able to smell rotten eggs or not.

thanks internets.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 10:30 AM on August 12

In 2002 I forgot to bring a copy of a poem my wife was reading in the wedding ceremony, but we were near my work office so I popped into the office, connected to my home ftp server, grabbed the file from my desktop at home and printed it there are work in seconds. It saved the day since we couldn't drive home and back to the wedding in time for the ceremony. (my blog post about it)
posted by mathowie at 2:51 PM on August 12