That's an interesting thought that I didn't consider. In a decade or so of using it I've never, anecdotally of course, had a problem.

^---- yes, this is exactly it. Especially since most CSRs you're going to be talking about don't have English as their first language and don't have the same cultural background as you.

That's why the people I know who use it at work don't use it while on the phone with Comcast.

The other side will either know the NATO alphabet or be able to understand it anyway. It was designed to be interpreted and used by non English speakers, since most of NATO doesn't/didn't speak English. I've used it dozens of times, zero errors.

It's really good enough to be considered a sort of spoken language Golay code.

But doesn't it sound so much cooler and so much more badass to say

hotel echo lima lima oscar whiskey oscar romeo lima delta?

Makes the person on the other side of the phone immediately have the kind of respect that one would have for someone who can order air strikes :-D

To which the recipient might be thinking E, E... no wait the first E must have been something else then... ah H, so: H E... slow down a bit... why isn't this person using the same phonetics as the other callers...?

Is that first one an "H" or an "E"? Is that second one an "E" or a "V"?

That's the problem with home-made solutions, across any form of lossy medium (aka static or accents), the home-made replacements are not always distinct enough.