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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

The nato phonetic alphabet one cracked me up. My dude you don't need that, call center employees don't know it, just say S as in Sugar like ur grandma used to.

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The NATO alphabet is made of commonly known words that are hard to misspell and hard to mishear (at least the initial phonemes). The person on the other end doesn't need to be able to recite the words, they just need to be able to hear "november" and recognize that it starts with N.

Yes thank you that's a good description of what a phonetic alphabet is and how it's used.

The nato phonetic alphabet is still useful even if the other party doesn't know it, I've used it a bunch of times on the phone to spell out my 10- letter last name. Saves quite a lot of time and energy for me vs saying "letter as in word" for each letter.

> saying "letter as in word" for each letter

Which often just confuses things further.

Me: My name is "Farb" F-A-R-B. B as in Baker.

Them: Farb-Baker, got it.

"M as in Mancy."

Right but it's not much more useful than any other phonetic alphabet the other party doesn't know, including the one you make up on the spot.

If you're me, it's still useful because the ones I make up on the spot aren't great.

"S-T-E-V-E @ gmail.com, S as in sun, T as in taste, ..." "Got it, fpeve."

I dunno, there's a pretty good chance that the one that people spent time and effort designing to replace earlier efforts with the goal of reducing potential ambiguity and for use over noisy connections with expectation that mistakes could cost lives is probably better than what you improvise on the spot

Exactly. The listening party doesn't need to have knowledge of the NATO alphabet to still benefit from it since they are just regular English words.

I once had someone sound out a serial number over a spotty phone connection years ago and they said "N as in NAIL". You know what sounds a lot like NAIL? MAIL.

And that is why we don't just arbitrarily make up phonetic alphabets.

When I worked in customer service, I asked a teammate what I could do to spell back something the customer said, and she taught me that system, it helped me a lot.

I once had the customer service agent for Iberia (the Spanish airline) confirm my confirmation number with me using it.

It worked with me and I guess it must have usually worked for him in most of his customer interactions.

I've found the NATO alphabet fairly common at call centers, with globalization being a factor.

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