Interesting, I've never had people on the phone not understand it. If anything I sometimes get the opposite, they start talking faster and treating me with less

Interesting, I've never had people on the phone not understand it. If anything I sometimes get the opposite, they start talking faster and treating me with less of the "yet another moron on the phone" attitude that I'm sure you can't help developing working a call centre. I always thought it was a shibboleth, like the tech support reaction I'm sure people here get occasionally where you can hear them realize they aren't going to have to explain how to click on a menu entry to you and switch scripts after you correctly use a technical phrase. Come to think of it, maybe they assume I was/am in the military. That never occurred to me before.