We have a new item for the running joke about how water and other things spin clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. In New Zealand, the rotary phones went from 9 to 0. (The illustration is from Peter Jackson's horror/splatstick film
Dead Alive.) Our insightful friend
Tamara notes that in both hemispheres the zero is fixed at the bottom of the dial. Aha! That's why we sometimes put a slash through the zero — it represents the equator, angled in honor of the Earth's axis!