(Note to mods: I've specifically put this in Off-topic, because it's really about Auckland Council, and imo it doesn't really fit the Telecom forum)

TL;DR Version: Auckland Council has weird hi-jinx with their local phone number, that in some cases, forces people to make a 'toll call'.

Okay, so the Auckland Council has a special 'call free from anywhere in Auckland' number: (09) 301 0101, they've had it since the merger in November last year.

We were part of the old Rodney Western Ward (specifically in Waimauku - which is part of the Auckland Local Calling Area).

After the merger happened, calling worked fine as a local number (301 0101) for us for a while, although half the time we'd ring up the person in the call centre (presuming the old Auckland City Council staff) would say "Oh, I have no idea about that, let me transfer you to Owera".

At one point I commented about this to one of the Owera staff who told me "Oh yeah, we are changing that, anyone calling from the old Rodney will get automatically diverted to the Owera phone system 'soon'", which I just assumed meant that Auckland Council would just trunk the calls to Owera.  But oh how wrong I was!

A couple of months ago, when I was still with Orcon for tolls, we tried to call the Council and started getting messages from the exchange saying to the effect of: "This is an automated message from Telecom, the number you are dialling is a Toll Call and needs to be prefixed with '09'", Orcon told me on Twitter that "Well yeah, that number would be charged at normal rates if you prefix w/ 09" so I called up Telecom to report a fault with local calling.  (To cut a long story short, after one unhelpful Faults guy, I managed to get someone that knew what they were doing, and they did some fancy thing to override the override code, which let me dial as a free call, but I never heard what the outcome of the issue was, so assumed it was fixed). 

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, we needed to query something with the council, so called again, and got the exact same exchange message, now with tolls at Telecom, and the same issue, I called faults ago, and after some hunting by them got told that instead of (what I'd assume is the norm) Auckland Council handling redirecting calls within their own system, they asked Telecom to redirect calls from ex-Rodney area phone prefixes, to the Owera office, at the exchange level, because I didn't dial '09' the exchange(s) wouldn't let the redirect to an out-of-area exchange happen.

In the end faults said, "It's not a fault, it's not an ideal setup, it confuses us, but it's how we were told to set it up".  (And I can't blame them, gotta listen to the people that pay the big $$$)

I'm not stingy for not dialing 09 before dialing a local number, and I am left to wonder, how many other people are confused by this (especially when I'm sure I've heard Auckland Council omit the 09 in Radio Ads).

Anyway, this is mainly for humour, and the question: Are there any other weird/wacky setups like this in NZ?