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Every graduate from elementary, junior and senior high school has to score a minimum percentage on a number of nationally set exams. One of these compulsory subjects is mathematics, and such is its level of difficulty that Jakarta supports a large number of private institutions providing extra lessons.

One would assume therefore that in-depth practical applications of the subject would be commonplace. That would be wrong.

Our house is situated in a back street off a main road and our address, like everyone else’s in our neighborhood, does have a certain arithmetic logic. Streets that exit the main street, the jalan raya, are in alphabetical order, so to get to our house you first need to enter the jalan raya, say, for example, Jalan Sudirman, and then look for Jalan D. However, our back street runs parallel to Jalan Sudirman and similar streets are named by letters starting from the far end of the alphabet, so we live on Jalan X which, like the main street, is quite long. Thus our nominal address is Jalan Sudirman X/6.

Further, in the interests of rukun (harmony) and social control, each house is designated to be within a rukun tetangga (neighborhood association) of, in our case, 45 houses, and every resident is supposed to be registered with Pak RT, the head of the association.

Additionally, each RT is a subdivision of a rukun warga (citizen’s association), which groups about a dozen RTs, which in turn is a subdivision of a kelurahan (village administrative unit). This is where Indonesians sort out ID cards and check whether their names have been included on the electoral register. In terms of the larger bureaucracy, our kelurahan is a subdivision of one of the five Jakarta municipalities. So it goes up to City Hall, through the police, immigration and whichever other government department is interested in keeping tabs on the 230 or so million people in this vast country.

It’s important that addresses show both the RT and RW codes, particularly in our case as there are six houses with the notional address of JalanSudirman X/6, a not uncommon occurrence.

A few years back, an ex-colleague of mine, with his Indonesian family, lived on Jalan H, a short walk away. They lived at number 36 which was next to and on the left of number 47. We supposed that this anomaly could have been explained by the amalgamation of a number of smaller parcels of land some 50 years ago when the original farmland was sold off to be smothered with bricks and mortar. But that still doesn’t explain why the house on the other side also had the number 47.

Such numbering can, of course, lead to confusion. On our street, one of the X/6s supplies domestic workers, probably for Saudi Arabia, and another serves as the surgery of a doctor.

Being woken up in the middle of the night by a driver from the provinces attempting to deliver a future maid has become distinctly unfunny. Slightly more bearable are the courier services attempting to deliver urgent medicines to a doctor, or, better yet, missives from banks that occasionally include credit cards. Unfortunately for us, we are honest folk and we suggest, generally politely, that they check the RT/RW designation of their destination or try telephoning the intended recipient.

Our number and RT/RW numbers are prominently displayed at the front gate: Jalan Sudirman X/6, RT007/RW 012. If everyone followed these guidelines then we would expect to sleep relatively soundly and have fewer trips to the front gate.

Even then we would not necessarily be free from the effects of numerical chaos.

Our telephone landline was installed about 19 years ago. I remember it well because the owner of the house had been on Telkom’s waiting list for some eight years and it was a day of great rejoicing. Three years later, a couple of friends rang to let us know that our number had been changed: Telkom hadn’t informed us.

Our home phone number has, thankfully, remained the same ever since but that doesn’t mean that all’s well. Some phrases in Indonesian trip off my tongue with ease, and “ salah sambung” (“wrong connection”) is one of these.

For a couple of years we would get calls asking to speak to Pak So And So of PT Such & Such. We never worked out what line of business he was in.

More recently, we have discovered that our number is shared with a hotel in Bogor, the town about 60 kilometers south of Jakarta, and we are worried about our reputation. You see, most callers ask to be put through to Dewi, or another woman, in a particular room number. That most of these calls happen quite late in the evening has led us to think that the hotel in question is not so much a boutique hotel as a boudoir hotel.

We would be grateful if future clientele would remember to dial the Bogor area code, which is 0251, before dialing our number.

Terry Collins is the co-author of “Culture Shock! Jakarta.” His blog, Jakartass, is at jakartass.blogspot.com.