Ever heard of the phonetic alphabet?
Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 17:03 I’ve spent the better part of three days on the phone with various and sundry technical support people from India to every corner of the United States. In that time, only one knew the proper phonetic alphabet, in order to spell a web address or other information that I needed to take down.
Yes, he was a pilot. We instantly identified… “alpha, quebec, fife, niner. Over.”
With the others … well, I nearly strained my eyes rolling them every time one would stumble through their own ad hoc massacre of a hastily invented phonetic alphabet. In a couple of cases, it was so bad that I couldn’t understand anything they were trying to communicate and simply hung up and recalled tech support to get anybody else.
Jeeze.
What is the phonetic alphabet? Or, a ‘spelling alphabet’ for that matter?
From Wikipedia:
