Motel Phone Phonetics

At our motel, we issue tokens with a simple password made up of 6 random letters and numbers to access our wireless internet network. Most of the time, I give these out in the form of a nicely printed voucher as part of the check-in process, however we still get a lot of our guests that ring us from their room requesting an internet code.

It is surprising how frustrating the process of communicating a 6-charactor code can be. More often than not, guests that initiate the phone call will not have a pen ready, and there is the maddening wait while they scurry around to find one. Then there are those guests that insist on laboriously finding and henpecking the characters on their keyboard as you wait an eternity between their haphazard keystrokes.

While numbers are easily spoken and understood, letters are harder to communicate - My monotone Kiwi accent, that mashes together the English language doesn't help this process;-)

In order to make letters understood I have been using phonetics with the first word that comes to mind - however, the lovely Mrs Motella kindly pointed out that using associating words such as "D for Dummy" and "R for Retard" is probably not appropriate as part of our professional customer service mantra.

A quick search of Google has given me the more familiar and accepted Army Phonetics Alphabet that I've reproduced for easy reference - I promise I'll try and use these in future:


A: Alpha
B: Bravo
C: Charlie
D: Delta
E: Echo
F: Foxtrot
G: Golf
H: Hotel
I: India
J: Juliet
K: Kilo
L: Lima
M: Mike
N: November
O: Oscar
P: Papa
Q: Quebec
R: Romeo
S: Sierra
T: Tango
U: Uniform
V: Victor
W: Whiskey
X: X-Ray
Y: Yankee
Z: Zulu