I was a mail carrier for thirty-one years. I have a decent sense of direction. Don’t tell me how to get to your place—tell me your address. I will find it. When everything else in life is going off the rails and a carload of personal concerns is plunging into a ravine and the entire planet is redundantly catching on fire, I like to think: At least I can read a map.

That is what I like to think.

In particular, I like to think I could locate a damn post office in the next county over. My decades of service to the company should have seared a groove into the network of available postal outlets. But the other day, short of time, I delegated the job to my phone. The navigation app began.

The app duly dumped me off into a parking lot that had been dressed up with a street name and then told me to turn left. There wasn’t any “left” left. It was a parking lot. I didn’t see an actual post office. There were mail trucks and stranded mail-handling equipment and all sorts of sign of postality. My app began barking. Return to route. Return to route. Return to route. I edged forward. I backed up. Surely if I had a low-rider I could bounce my way to my destination.

It was as if I’d landed on the North Pole and consulted my compass and the needle was spinning in circles and maybe snickering a little.

I exited the parking lot and the app started up again, this time taking me one street further and again telling me to turn left where there was no left turn. I parked at a sheet metal business and walked up to the receptionist. Can I help you? she wanted to know.

I have now been driving around within 3/4 of a block from the phantom post office for fifteen minutes. I began mutely banging my head on her counter. Oh, you’re looking for the post office, she said.

She directed me right back to the original parking lot and told me to look for “a funky little door.” I drove back. Sure enough, funky little door. Could have been a hobbit-hole. And inside, in a dank hallway, a counter with a clerk behind it.

“Hi! Finally! Just a few things. I need a stamp for this envelope and I need to mail this package.”

Oh. She can’t do that here. What she could do was take in metered presorted mail in trays. Did I have any of that?

“So this isn’t a retail window?”

This was not. She sent me to another post office. She had a stack of paper directions all ready to hand out, oh yes she did.

Five minutes later, I was at a recognizable post office, with a flag and PO boxes and window clerks and everything. I plopped my letter and parcel on the counter. “This one’s two ounces,” I said, highly relieved. “I just need postage.”

She frowned at my letter. Squished it a little. “Can this be folded?”

I guess, I said. It won’t hurt anything. It’s just a key taped to cardboard.

“So it’s not machineable.”

But it’s under a quarter inch thick. (I wanted to demonstrate my expertise in postal minutiae.)

“But you can’t fold it.”

And you don’t fold envelopes to send them through a machine. I began to feel huffy. My ten-minute errand was closing in on an hour and I hadn’t accomplished a thing. But you can’t argue with a mail clerk. They don’t have leeway and can’t use discretion. What they do have is a stupefying amount of rules and regs printed right on their cortex. I’ve seen it before:

You can walk up to a mail clerk and hand her a package for a foreign country and even have the little customs form all filled out in advance like a solid citizen, and she will give it her postal frowny face and say “Oh. Peru? We can’t take that.”

Of course you can!

“No. Most of Peru, but not in the Ucayali region, except the last three weeks in November, and it has to be under forty ounces.”

She studies your blinking face. “Would you like to send this somewhere else?”

No! No, I would not like to send this somewhere else. Unless you would like me to shove this up…

Back to the matter at hand. The clerk had handed my letter back to me but, when pressed, admitted she could make it go if I ponied up an extra quarter. Next: my binoculars, all packaged up with a printed shipping label the company sent me taped to it already. “I just want to add some insurance on…”

“This is FedEX,” she said. Oh. The company said they do FedEX and Postal Service and can you just slap some postage on this and…

“This is FedEX,” she repeated, with emphasis, and no evidence of amusement.

I’ve heard people complain that window clerks are a dour and soulless bunch. But know this. Many people arrive at the window at the end of a long line after having done ten turns in a tiny parking lot with a barking app and they just want to send a pane of LSD to their abuela in Ucayali and that window clerk won’t let them. That window clerk deals with upset people all day long. She’d need a big pay bump to be friendly, too.