Chanelling Kafka: no door opens

Moving towns is a bit of a bureaucratic mess. You have to close all utility connections in one place and open them in another. For almost a month (with breaks for sanity) I’ve been making the rounds of semi-government offices, trying to transfer things like gas and electricity connections. They involve navigating mazes of corridors lined with cubicles, ferrying a sheet of paper from one desk to another. There are others who wander the corridors with a sheet of paper in hand. You recognize yet another lost soul. Now and then a door opens up, bright with promise. But it only leads to a cross corridor. Is there a way out of this? I see a liftman smile at me and open the collapsing door of an ancient lift. He deposits me two floors up. A metal staircase has been welded to the wall here. I take it down to a parking lot with a mandir in one corner. Two people stand there, praying. There is no other way out. And I still haven’t surrendered the land-line which has not rung in four years!