I used to live in a small beach-side community in New Zealand, this was back in the time of mechanical (stepper) telephone exchanges. Locally we had 3 digit pho

I used to live in a small beach-side community in New Zealand, this was back in the time of mechanical (stepper) telephone exchanges. Locally we had 3 digit phone numbers - dialing a "2" would get us a circuit (a actual physical pair of wires) to the nearest city, in the city dialing "22" would get you a circuit to our community. There were asmall limited number of wires going over the hill to town, if you dialed "222222222222222222222222222222" ......