Bravo-Luna-Oscar-Golf

PART I
PART II
PART III

Have you ever been on a web conference where the material presented was so indispensable or interesting that you wanted to email the speaker and ask a couple of questions? So you sent a chat message asking for the speakers email address. The speaker saw your message and in the course of their closing comments they said, “Oh and if you want to reach me later and ask questions, my email address is “p” “smith” “at hotmail dot com”. There it is.

Your brain goes into gear and you propel yourself forward, (cause you were leaning back in your chair) to find a writing utensil and a scrap of paper. You can immediately find neither and you yelp. At this point a co-worker throws you a pen from across the way, you test it to make sure it writes on your hand and you begin to scribble…and you can’t remember exactly what the speaker said even though it was an easy one. “Smith” and “hotmail”, you’ve got that right for sure but the speaker’s first name initial is the problem. You don’t remember hearing it announced during the introduction. Did the speaker say B, D, E, G, P, or T? You are pretty sure it wasn’t Z.

You could either guess or you could send a note to 6 different email addresses and know you’ll get one right. The other 5 will probably forward your email address to an off-shore pharmaceutical corporation with a quick note saying you want to order two years worth of Viagra.

Variations on this scenario happen all the time in different telephony venues, not just web conferences. Getting letters correct has been a problem since we started communicating via radio and various militaries and international organizations have devised phonetic alphabets to make sure the message is received properly. Currently, many folks are using the NATO phonetic alphabet and speaker Smith could have saved you some spam mail if he had only said,”My email address is P as in papa, sierra, mike, India, tango, hotel at hotmail.com”. It would have been effortless, huh?

“Psmith” is an easy one. In my next blog, I’ll talk about what you should do if your email address isn’t so easy.

NATO Phonetics

PART I
PART II
PART III