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This makes me think of two things: 1. the NATO alphabet. (Alfa, bravo, charlie, delta…) It's surprisingly easy to memorize: it will only take you a few sitting
by deathanatos 1y ago
This makes me think of two things:
1. the NATO alphabet. (Alfa, bravo, charlie, delta…) It's surprisingly easy to memorize: it will only take you a few sittings of practice. And it's useful, for when you need to turn letters into words. And then people cutely wonder if you're ex-military.
2. I tie a small ribbon to my luggage. It could be anything: string, tinsel. If you're familiar with wine glass charms, same idea. It makes the bag identifiable from distance, so long as the charm is in line of sight. It does not, remarkably, stop strangers from grabbing the wrong bag, but it does get funny if they insist they recognize their bag when you ask them "you tied sparkly pink ribbon to your bag?"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mattlondon 1y agoWhy not just put a name tag on your luggage?
- teo_zero 1y agoWhile effective, a tag is not efficient. Namely it misses two properties: "quickly" and "at a distance".
- aapoalas 1y agoI have a (knock-off) Moomin character as my tag: now it is again quickly recognisable at a distance.
- deathanatos 1y agoI have that too, of course! Can't read the name tag from across the baggage claim though, but sparkly ribbon + case design you can, and you can be 100% confident that that's your bag a stranger just grabbed.
- IAmBroom 1y agoMy solution was quicker and faster: buy luggage that is not black. It now is recognizable at 100 yds against a pile of luggage. OK, a minority of luggage is also non-black, but there's a range of colors. Mine is a medium blue, and so false positives are about 1%, and false negatives are nil.
- rf15 1y agoAn anecdote: I easily remember short-ish (pins, phone numbers) number combinations, learn completely new alphabets of new languages easily enough, just like their words, but I struggle to learn the NATO alphabet: the words have no meaning and I don't perceive them as atomic enough like a letter or number is, so it mostly looks like a large amount of random noise to me, like having to learn pi to 100 digits.
- gblargg 1y agoI forced myself to learn the NATO alphabet recently by using some online flashcards. Nothing complex, just shows the letter and I have to recall the word, then click to see if I got it right. Didn't take very long to get it down, and I go through them every few days to verify recall.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoThe NATO alphabet is an uncanny intersection of being highly memorable and having carefully engineered properties across several dimensions. Whoever designed it did a brilliant job. It is sticky as hell and surprisingly useful. I do assume that people who know it are ex-military but that isn’t entirely reliable in the US. A lot of other people picked it up, in part because it is so easy to learn by osmosis.
- defrost 1y agoI know it from amateur radio, emergency services, and maritime communications, it's "officially" the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, shorthanded by some as the NATO Alphabet. Others may know it by virtue of being fans of, or simply exposed to the Bloodhound Gang. ( FWiW I'm neither in nor from middle North America )
- GaelFG 1y agoWas really helpfull when making international phone call to services like IRS or sometime good providers. Trying to spell out my french name and long adress or some order number with my strong accent was such a pain until then ^^
- fainpul 1y ago> Whoever designed it did a brilliant job. It was an iterative process. Various words have been replaced over time, as problems became obvious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
- neonz80 1y agoRobWords made a video about it a few weeks ago! https://youtu.be/UAT-eOzeY4M https://youtu.be/UAT-eOzeY4M
- devilbunny 1y agoIt's nigh-universal in the travel industry.
- chias 1y agoOnce upon a time I read the joking phrase "M as in Mancy" and now it is the only thing I can ever think of when trying to spell out the letter M. Perhaps I have now infected one of you. I am sorry.
- xavdid 1y agoThis was originated (or at least popularized) in an episode of Archer from season 1. It remains maybe my favorite 5 minutes of comedy ever out to screen. It's just so tight! https://youtube.com/watch?v=dNYMQpcqscA https://youtube.com/watch?v=dNYMQpcqscA
- halfcat 1y agoI once had a customer say, ”G as in dog”. Yes.
- deathanatos 1y agoIn my head I also maintain what I call the "adversarial NATO alphabet", which is sadly incomplete, but contains stuff like, "C, as in sea"; "Q, as in cue"; "T, as in tea", "I, as in eye".
- necklesspen 1y agoOn a side note, the NATO alphabet is quite normalised in the Netherlands - most telephone operators will default to it when providing you information and likewise there is an expectation on you to use it when providing spelling sensitive information such as emails.
- jvvw 1y agoSame in UK - I usually use it when giving my postcode to people.