NATO Phonetic Alphabet

I got tired of trying to recite MAC addresses to people on the phone and not knowing what word to associate with D and E to make them sound different. So this morning, knowing I had to read a bunch of letters and numbers to a Comcast tech, I went and looked it up. How? I just started googling words like Foxtrot and Baker and things I could remember and let me just tell you, Wikipedia is my friend. Here’s the NATO Phonetic Alphabet with all the goods. And it’s Bravo, not Baker. Baker was WWII. (Which is different from WII.) Anyway, I still messed it up on the phone but now I have the resource.

In the Wikipedia entry it says, reassuringly, “It has found heavy usage in the information technology industry to accurately and quickly communicate serial/reference codes (which can be and are frequently extremely long) or other specialized information by voice.”