Calling Time
A new service was recently introduced in Shalampax. You can now call a special telephone number to hear the time.
This is a fully automated system, so operators don’t need to be standing by. Exceptionally sophisticated speech synthesis software, running on an extraordinarily powerful computer, speaks the time whenever someone calls the number attached to the computer.
The number to call is 0-600. This number is accessible only in Shalampax. The unavailability of this service elsewhere is not much of a loss to the rest of the world because Shalampax is in a unique time zone that gets reset each morning when Manexposinghimself, our Prime Minister, wakes up.
When the time zone is reset in the morning, all clocks in Shalampax are automatically synchronized with the new time. Thus, this phone service is of use only if you are near a phone, but not near a clock.
One drawback of the new system is that the computer is programmed to say only “at the tone, it will be exactly six p.m.” Shalampaxians are, therefore, asked to be careful to call in only at that time.
This wouldn’t work for me as my phone has no hyphen button.