When you are on the phone with an airline company, or any other outfit that requires confirmation codes, sometimes you need to spell out a six letter nonsense word, like DMXRFU or ZYTPSW. There is no great way to do this, so most of us resort to saying things like “D as in Denver, M as in mammoth, …”<\/p>\n
But sometimes this doesn’t work as planned. A friend told me recently that she was on the phone with an airline representative who was trying to give helpful hints.<\/p>\n
The representative explained how you could choose words that made the process easier. “For example,” she said, “you could say Q as in ‘cucumber’.”<\/p>\n
My friend was too polite to correct the nice lady on the phone, but hearing that story got me thinking. What are the various ways that people might screw this up?<\/p>\n
So here are some helpful suggestions for how one might sow chaos and confusion, in the course of trying to helpfully spell out the letters of those mysterious six letter codes:<\/p>\n
A as in eight\n C as in sea lion\n E as in Igor\n G as in jeep\n I as in eyeball\n K as in candy\n Q as in cucumber\n S as in ace\n U as in pew\n X as in accent\n Y as in wine\n Z as in peas\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you are on the phone with an airline company, or any other outfit that requires confirmation codes, sometimes you need to spell out a six letter nonsense word, like DMXRFU or ZYTPSW. There is no great way to do this, so most of us resort to saying things like “D as in Denver, M … Continue reading “Initial confusion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24853"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24853"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24855,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24853\/revisions\/24855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}