K as in....uh....uh....Kangaroo?

I'm not the biggest fan of talking on the phone.  Mostly because I am surprisingly bad at it.  This sounds stupid, but its true. When I talk on the phone I get tongue-tied and I fumble all over the place.  This isn't usually too bad during the course of a normal phone conversation where the other party is able to cut me off and direct the conversation far better than I am capable of, but all of the voicemail messages I leave are always awkwardly horrible.  Even as I am leaving the message I feel how stupid I am, but I am already too far in to turn back, so I just rush through the rest of the message I am leaving, quickly sign off and spend the next 15 minutes overanalyzing the awkward message I just left.

I also have this horribly high squeaky voice, which only gets higher and squeakier when I speak on the phone. Seriously, why do people even have phone voices? And why can't I control mine better?!!

Honestly, I never feel like a bigger idiot than when I am on the phone....except for possibly the one exception of when I'm on the phone at work, and unfortunately for me, a large part of my job requires me to answer phones.

Today at work a client  called and asked for some information. I ended up having to share a few email addresses with her and had to spell them out for her.Why is it so hard to come up with a words that start with the letter you are saying when you are spelling a word out for people? Is this just me? I've always struggle with it, I hmmm and haw for a good minute every time and sound like a complete moron as I scour my brain for a word, any word, that starts with that letter.

Today was even worse than usual because the client on the phone had an Australian accent and the first letter of the word was 'k,' so my brain brilliantly came up with, "K as in Kangaroo."  At which point I started mentally kicking myself hoping that she wouldn't be offended by the word that I had chosen (I realize it doesn't sound offensive, but still it wasn't the best choice to come to mind, and unfortunately it was the only word that came to mind).