No-holds-barred quiz

No. But 'telephone exchanges' was one of the phrases I deleted from the part of my fruitless conversation with ChatGPT when it got curiously close to the answer, but failed to land it. It kept going on about those five telephone exchanges being the first to do something (as well as the 300th). Now personally I had no idea that it had happened in stages, so I looked it up, and lo, it was true that Glasgow was the second to do it after London, but it wasn't easy to find out the next five areas. They might well have included Birmingham, Liverpool and Nottingham, because these are cities, but Portadown is small and Bangor even smaller, so they probably weren't involved.

In any case, the answer has nothing to do with when various telephone exhanges started to do this, which would be dull enough. Believe it or not, the answer is even more boring, but it refers to something that is happening now in those five locations. Indeed, at the very moment I'm typing.

I'm not sure whether all this will help or hinder.

Nothing to do with that, sorry.

The three-digit number should be the biggest hint. Especially now.

The number for the speaking clock is 123 in this country, so that could have been the three-digit number. But no.

It's apparently a four-digit number in France, which introduced the service. And it's 956599429 in Spain. Do you get the feeling they were trying to discourage people? And who calls the speaking clock nowadays?

Does it have something to do with special phone numbers?

I thought I could get away with it. The thing is at this point I didn't want to be too specific; the way I meant it was something like a number that doesn't follow the usual phone number patterns (in particular, it may be short or redundant), that's managed by an institution or a company in order to provide callers with a specific service. But more particularly I was thinking of emergency numbers.

Go on...