Thursday, June 28

Y is for...

Because the calls for my office are routed through our head office, located somewhere in the Mars' wastelands, we are trained to repeat back details in the phonetic alphabet, making up for the lack of quality on the lines.

This has the unfortunate effect of making us sound like we're telling a bad joke about Uncle Charlie doing the Foxtrot in Quebec, and quickly, most of us make up our own phonetic replacements, E. g., A for 'allo 'allo, b for boxers, c for culinary... Sticking to the original phonetics can cause problems.

For example, a few days ago, a new girl was reading back a number plate to a customer. It was a Y plate and she used phonetics, beginning with 'Y for Yankee.'

For some Freudian reason however, she replaced the 'y' in 'yankee' with a 'w.' The result was somewhat unfortunate.

I know a girl who needs to make up her own phonetic alphabet... It would seem however, that she has other things on her mind.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

interesting. I work next to a former marine so I'm used to hearing. "Echo Tango Gamma..."

Thanks for dropping by my blog, btw.

Preeti Shenoy said...

:-) Now I wonder why she did that!

Jenn in Holland said...

hahahaha! That's just great. Or is it just so wrong?

Thanks for the nod, that's way cool of you. No doubt about it.

Webmiztris said...

I couldn't possibly make up my own PC alphabet...there's too many possibilities there!

Melanie said...

Haha! That is hilarious!!

The Rock Chick said...

I used to work as a Police/Fire Dispatcher and doing that is so ingrained in you that when I have to spell my name I literally speak out the words...instead of J-E-S-S-I-C-A, I want to say John, Edward, Sam, Sam, Ida, Charles, Adam,

It drives people batty! But, I will say it's not quite as funny as saying "10-4" to the speaker in the drive-thrui food windows! I hear that radio scratch and I just can't help myself!!

Thanks for stopping by!
Jessica The Rock Chick

Itsnopicknick said...

LOL!!! I can think of some pretty good new phonetics to throw in. Must keep things at the office entertaining if nothing else!

meh said...

I used to hate using "Pappa Hotel Oscar November Echo Tango India Charlie Sierra" too!! Sadly, after using it for so long, I fear I might never forget it....

Dale said...

I make up different ones every time I have to do it but I don't think I've ever used wankee for y or w!

Anonymous said...

Geeze, may favourite word next to hypotwit is wanker :-)

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