Business Casual

Being an Applachian-American, I can have a pretty thick accent at times so I get the basic concept behind the phonetic alphabet. And when I worked tech support one summer during college, I remember using similar methods when I repeated model and serial numbers to people over the phone. However, I didn't use the military-sounding ones like you find in the official list here. I used what I thought were more normal words like A as in Apple, B as in Boy. No one ever called me out for not using the official list or using words that they didn't understand. Of course, I didn't deal with a lot of international calls at the time so that may have made a difference.

I think one of the key things when doing the phonetic alphabet is to make sure you do the "letter as in" portion. If you give it to people like you a policeman rattling off a suspect's license plate (Whiskey, Bravo, Charlie), there's going to be confusion as people will just start writing the whole word you just said.