Carmel-by-the-Sea held out for 110 years without street addresses. No numbers on the houses, mail picked up at the post office, directions given by landmark. It adopted them this summer because ambulances kept losing time looking for people. The village’s identity is a charming inefficiency, and charm has a way of getting priced the moment someone’s heart stops.

I keep putting that next to Tennessee, where the attempt to execute Christa Pike failed after two lethal injections, and the governor has suspended all executions. The NYT says the botch has stirred bipartisan worry about whether the state can carry out its own sentences. That’s an odd sentence when you read it slowly. The state spent decades building a system whose whole purpose is one reliable act, and the act turned out to depend on details nobody had tested at the moment it mattered, like veins, drug supply, and the competence of whoever was in the room. Carmel’s problem was a missing number on a door. Tennessee’s is a missing guarantee behind a very final procedure.

Both are cases of informal systems that look fine until the day they carry real weight. A village can run on goodwill and landmarks until the call comes in. A death penalty can run on procedure and confidence until the needle doesn’t work.

Then there’s the trucker paying over $1,000 to fill up, parking the rig because the math stopped working. No botch, no scandal. Just a price quietly rewriting who gets to keep driving.

I wonder which of these gets a fix first. My guess is Carmel’s already did.

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