I got hopelessly mixed up today in a conversation with an airline agent. Oh, I am so surprised, you are not saying. But this should have been a straightforward, simple exchange of information. Instead, it was an amazingly tangled process just to get the agent to find the record I was talking about. She wanted the record locator. I tried to give it to her. I may as well have been speaking ancient Urdu for all the good it was doing me.
The databases used by the travel industry, whether at an agency or an airline, assign randomly-generated six letter codes to each passenger record, and these are universally known as record locators. So when you call an agent to discuss a particular record it's much faster to give the record locator than try to pin it down by flight number or passenger last name. The main problem is over the phone all those D's and V's can sound like T's or B's. Rather than wasting time yelling, "T! I said T, not D!" into the phone, most people substitute the military codes: baker, charlie, tango, and so on. Unfortunately for me and everyone I talk to, I don't actually know the military codes. Instead, I use men's names. Well, mostly men's names. I don't know of a man's name that starts with U, so I say Uncle. Lots of agents use the men's names variant but the names themselves are, as you can imagine, far from standardized. My David is someone else's Donald, and never the twain shall meet when we're talking to a third person who uses some completely renegade version like Diarmuid or Dimples.
The conversations can get profoundly weird. I'll be trying to come across as cool, calm, and professional while reeling off a string of men's names and instead I sound like a madame lining up the weekend's customers: "This is Lucy with XXX Travel, I'd like you to look at David Michael Thomas Victor Albert Joe." Oh, baby. But it's better than when I lamely try to use as much military lingo as I can recall. That always makes me sound like I'm reading one of those refrigerator magnet poems: "Delta Mango Tango Valentine Albert Gore."
At any rate, this agent I was speaking with today was bent out of shape about my choice of lingo and refused to understand me. I tried to discern her vocabulary of choice, but it was tough. She was on the Dimples system and I was flipping between military and men's names. The woman who works next to me was shaking with laughter as I repeated the record locator in all possible variants, including country names. Finally, I got the situation sorted out and hung up the phone just a tad too enthusiastically. My neighbor gave me a sympathetic look. Of course, she could afford to. She knows her alphas from her apples.
"Frank Uncle Charlie Kenneth," I muttered, and finished the fare quote. Someday, I want a job where I get to speak English.
