As a 14 year old I was laughed at by my coworkers for not being able to come up with a name that started with "Y" when reading a service tag to a Dell technician on the phone ("F as in Frank, Y as in... I don't know, the letter Y?"). I learned the NATO phonetic alphabet quickly after to avoid further embarrassment. I probably should have just taken the "Super Troopers" route and said "Yakitori" or something in retrospect.
The NATO phonetic alphabet was one of the highest reward-for-effort things I've ever learned. It doesn't take long to commit to memory and become proficient with and the amount of time I've saved on repeating spelling (or even just "A as in apple, M as in Mary" nonsense) over the decades has added up.
It's clear enough that even people unfamiliar with it previously can follow it when you're using it to spell something and by design it's clear even over poor audio connections (or in a noisy server room).
It honestly should be taught to everyone in elementary school.
My experience has been the opposite. The number of customer service representatives I speak with that simply can't comprehend the NATO phonetic alphabet never ceases to surprise me, somehow. More than half the time I'm nearly finished with my last name ("foxtrot india november charlie hotel...") when my interlocutor just says "whoa whoa whoa, what?" and I have to fall back to the annoyingly slow and frustrating "eff as in foxtrot..." form while effortfully disguising my palpable disappointment. It's just one more way for humanity to disappoint me.
that's literally the point.... it is really hard to confuse bravo with Victor, or Quebec with uniform no matter how crappy the ambient noise environment
At a guess it's to avoid a conflict with Yankee over a noisy channel. (I.e. if you hear "[static] ank [static]" did you hear "Frank" or "Yankee"? "Foxtrot" prevents that conflict.)
