Heh. The guy who sits behind me at work had a customer once who told him it as “Q for Cucumber”
Considering that most of the folks on this hemisphere named José probably live in Brazil, it would work just fine 
(and I’m certain they encounter endless frustration getting Americans to say their name right)
Years ago, I was working for a Philly-based multinational. A well-intending person sent a letter to everybody saying that she’d noticed people using all kinds of “as in” while spelling and saying that we should all use the “alpha, bravo, charlie…” list.
I was assisting a french lady when she got the mail. Since it was from someone very high up and we still had a while to go, she opened it. Seeing that it was an “all hands”, she asked me over to read it with her. When she finished, she said “it isn’t enough problem I have with English, I also must learn this silly list? What is wrong with ‘D like Dijon’, eh?” “Nothing wrong for me, I use names of countries and towns myself.” “Works for me!”
I spoke with a few people, foreigners like me, who’d looked at the whole list and decided that it was absolutely nonsensical and they weren’t going to bother learn such a thing by rote. We all went on using “A like Alabama, C like California, I like Indiana…” Many of the Americans used that list, but for a lot of us it simply didn’t make sense.
I would use first names but then I have a hard time not using my first name when describing the first letter of my first name. :smack:
“That’s ‘Gwendolen’. G as in Gwendolen, W as in William, E as in Edward…”
It’s helpful to remember that that the various phonetic alphabets came into being because sound frequencies above a certain level can’t, or at least couldn’t, be carried by standard phone and radio equipment. The problem was that the distinguishing sound features of many letter pairs were above that frequency boundary. So if you said ‘F’ on the phone, it could be mistaken for ‘S’. Vowels tend not to be as much of a problem in this regard, since their names don’t sound like other letters.* So I’m guessing you don’t have to label all the letters in your name with a soundalike word, e.g. you should be able to say, "‘x’ as in xylophone, ‘a’, ‘s’ as in Scooby-dooby-do, ‘h’.
*(Well except maybe ‘Y’ sometimes (:D); I supposed it could sound like an ‘I’).
I’ve always liked “E as in eye.”
I am on a personal crusade to get people to start using “H as in Hammerhead Shark” because I was once on a work call where I was trying to explain that an error in addressing some mail resulted in it being sent to the hotel part of a business as opposed to the administrative office.
“H as in Hotel” is traditional, but I felt I couldn’t say that because it was a hotel that was causing the problem in the first place. As these things tend to go, of course I couldn’t think of any other word that started with H until I finally shouted “as in Hammerhead Shark!”
So kids, do your part and say “H as in Hammerhead Shark.”