Funny question, Jim but a very legitimate one!
In many major markets, the LEC will set up mass-calling exchanges at the toll level instead of at the end office. This prevents 10,000 callers from crippling a local CO when the whole town is trying to win concert tickets. By off-loading this traffic in the toll offices, the impact of a huge inrush is minimized.
Since toll offices are engineered for 100% throughput, as in "trunk in, trunk out", they can handle huge influxes just fine. Local end offices are (were) designed around more casual dialing, so the allocation of receivers, etc. could be relaxed. It wasn't often that everyone in town picked up the phone at the same time to dial. I'm sure you remember crossbar offices where the absence of available receivers resulted in delayed dial tone. Even I remember that!
In the DC area, the 202-432 code was used for radio and TV call-in lines. New York City used 212-955. Now that CO equipment has become more sophisticated, there isn't the need for exchange-based routing between offices. In the day, these stations paid for circuits directly from the nearest toll switch to handle the incoming traffic, thus bypassing their local end office. This reduced or eliminated the proverbial "choke" points.
Most of these have been abandoned now, but ours still resides in a DMS-200 just in case. Many stations just use a toll-free number, which routes calls through toll switches by default.
