We have the same numbering in our rural shire as Joy described (it is specified in an Oz/NZ Standard) but I recall an incident before they introduced it and when I was living another 40km west.

As I came round a bend I found the copper wires of the phone line had been cut and left across the road, hazardously. I stopped and relocated them off the road and went home to ring Telstra; the copper lines to phones out our way had been replaced by underground optical fibre for a while.

When I got the Services Difficulties and Faults operator she asked me the location.
"Mrs McGrath's, just west of The Pinnacle"

Now, everyone along that road knew Mrs McGrath and all of the service techos in town did too. But, no. The Operator for our area had been relocated to Newcastle, five hours' drive closer to Sydney and she hadn't much of a clue. It took more than a week for the wire to be removed and to this day I'm not sure Telstra were the ones that retrieved it.

Thankfully I wasn't trying to report a fault in an LPG gas cylinder. A while later I responded to a house fire and (due to the incompetence of the local FCO) was required to direct a water stream from only one 1" hose to cool it; I could see the seam bulging with the heat from the fire. When we finally did get hold of the gas company, their faults responders had be relocated to Perth, clear across the continent.

Cheers, Rowan