There is a whole science to speech and they way things are heard and interpreted. Like the whole weird “Bah Bah Bah Fah Fah Fah” audio illusion video I posted recently, things can often be misinterpreted when someone speaks.

I work on a help desk, often taking calls from users on bad cell phone connections or even users with good connections that just sound muffled and audibly “blurry”. I ask for usernames and workstation names when needed, and often misinterpret “t’s” as “p’s” and vice versa, making it difficult to find the correct account or the right workstation name.

If everyone knew the phonetic alphabet, it would help a lot. But if you try to say “My last name is spelled Tom Robert Ocean Tom Tom Ida Edward Robert”, most users would just be confused thinking you have eight last names or something. When I hear that I instantly translate it to “TROTTIER” as it is read. Each word can be clearly heard and understood, even over most noisy or muffled phone lines, easily enough to spell it correctly if you understand what you’re listening to. But if the phonetic alphabet is unfamiliar to you, you just feel bombarded with a whole pile of miscellaneous words when all you wanted was the spelling of a person’s last name.

I don’t think it takes much to pick up a phonetic alphabet. Once you know how it works, it makes sense and you can start using it easily. The hardest part is probably memorizing the correct word to use for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet. I don’t actually know how I memorized them myself. I learned it when I was a kid, just from listening to the police scanner over the years. Not even realizing it, over time I had each letter committed to memory. There are several phonetic alphabets though. The two most popular ones are used by the Military and Law Enforcement. The one I know if Law Enforcement: Adam Boy Charles David Edward Frank George Henry Ida John King Lincoln Mary Nora Ocean Paul Queen Robert Sam Ton Union Victor William Xray Young Zebra. “W” is the hardest to remember, for some reason. I keep thinking it’s “Whiskey”.

The military phonetic alphabet is totally different, but they all make sense and work really good for spelling things out. The delay caused by speaking an entire word also helps to slow the person’s spelling of the word, giving you more time to type it out or write it down, so it just flows in smoothly.

Then there’s “10” codes. I know many of the law enforcement 10-codes, again, just from listening to the police scanner since I was a kid, but this is a completely different animal. Like 10:32 is “Gun” or “Man With Gun”. This one is also often just called “A 32”, as in “Suspect is waving a 32 around at people.”

Where am I going with this and why did I post it? Well, just because I had a very muffled help desk call this morning, and a phonetic would have helped a lot. Unfortunately, as I said, most people don’t know it, so all I can do is have them spell it multiple times, or slow down and give me one letter at a time. Another reason is just to distract me (and maybe my two or three regular visitors) for a minute or two away from the bombardment of political and racial crap being flung everywhere these days so close to the presidential election.

Whoops, just pushed you back in right there. My apologies. Now back to your regularly scheduled mayhem.