Not word-related, but here's a snippet of information I bet most people won't know about, even those who live in the USA.

Before deregulation of telephone services and the later cellphone revolution, the phone company (and we mean the phone company — in most places in the US, telephone service was a Bell monopoly) had no incentive to expand the infrastructure of any state more than what was necessary for its residents. The sole exception was Nebraska, because the Strategic Air Command or SAC (the Air Force command tasked with managing the Air Force's nuclear weapons) was based in Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha and needed insane amounts of incoming phone lines as insurance in the case of an attack. Needless to say, most of those lines went unused 365 days a year.
Mail-order companies, and especially those taking advantage of the new 800 service, saw potential in the infrastructure and petitioned Northwestern Bell and the government to let them make use of it. They agreed with the proviso that the businesses would be cut off if the Soviets attacked (well duh). There was a bigger problem, though: At the time, using the same 800 number both for calls within a specific state and calls from one state to another was against telephone company rules, one of many self-serving, seemingly random provisos people had to live with back in the Bell days. Sellers therefore had the choice of confusing their customers with two 800 numbers, one for callers within Nebraska and one for callers living in the rest of the country, or just having the one 800 number and barring Nebraska residents from calling (and possibly advertising a local number on local Omaha TV stations?). Most chose the latter.
As more call centers set up shop in Omaha, Northwestern Bell built more and more infrastructure to the point that the number of lines going into call centers dwarfed those originally used by the SAC. The rules about 800 numbers didn't change until the mid 1990s, when the SAC disbanded into the current STRATCOM. And Now You Know.

(From TV Tropes.)

I'd not heard of TVTropes. Neat site! Thanks!

I looked up Nebraska and found a fun little fact:

The only State with a unicameral legislature. All the members call themselves State Senators, are elected without party affiliation and can overide a veto by a majority of 60 percent instead of the usual 2/3rd number in all other states.