My husband often cites the phrase, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

I never thought much about the statement, never felt it applied much to my experiences.

Until recently, that is, when I managed to goof up, big time.

It started when I asked my niece, Alexis, who lives in Texas if there was anything she and her mother, my sister, Katherine, also a lapsed Mainer, would like to have from their native state.

“Is there something I can send you?” I asked.

She could think of only one thing — good Chinese food — which she said is sorely lacking in her area of Texas. Would I send her some overnight? A good friend of hers had done it a couple of years ago and it’s easy to do, she said. I just need to go to the restaurant, get the food, pack it in dry ice and send it overnight, via the U.S. Postal Service.

“Money is not an issue,” she said. “I’ll reimburse you.”

Just to get my ducks in a row, I asked our friendly clerk at the Waterville post office if I could send such a package, guaranteed overnight. He said the post office discontinued that practice a couple of months ago, so I called a local parcel delivery service to see if they could do it. No problem, the man said.

My niece texted me the list of foods she was craving: a poopoo platter for three (which includes chicken and beef speared with sticks, crab rangoon, egg rolls, chicken fingers, pork strips, chicken wings and fried rice), chicken chow mein with crunchy noodles on the side, eight extra egg rolls and extra-extra duck sauce — like two large tubs — as they like to put it on lots of other food, she said. She also directed me to a shop in Waterville where I could buy dry ice.

“I got this,” I said to myself, imagining Alexis’ delight at receiving the package.

The restaurant from which she desired the food is 20 miles from my home in Waterville, so I called to order it ahead of time and drove there to picked it up. Cost of the food? $100.12, which I paid by credit card. The bag was very heavy, and large.

I rushed back to Waterville and bought 5 pounds of dry ice for $11 and change, and quickly drove home and placed all the cartons of Chinese food in airtight plastic bags as Alexis had advised. Then I loaded everything, including packing paper and a couple of plastic garbage bags, into a cardboard box and headed to the parcel delivery store.

The woman at the counter looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Um, you can’t just put the food in a box like that,” she said. “It has to be styrofoam, or something that does not leak.”

So I hauled my load back in the car and drove to the local supermarket where a clerk told me there were no styrofoam coolers left, as they are a seasonal item. I called two other stores which also didn’t carry them, and then tried the local big box store. A woman there told me they had nine left and gave me the number of the aisle they were in.

Keenly conscious of the fact that the dry ice sitting in a box in my car was dissipating, I rushed into the store only to find an empty shelf where the styrofoam coolers were supposed to be. An employee, learning of my plight, called the woman I had spoken to on the phone earlier and she told him they must have been moved. Perhaps to the front of the store?

So, he and I walked all around the gigantic store, only to locate no styrofoam containers. He apologized.

Once outside in the parking lot, I called the parcel delivery shop and asked the clerk if there was a different container I could put the Chinese food in.

“By the way,” she replied, “What is the ZIP code to which you want to send the package?”

I fumbled through my bag, found the number, and cited it to her.

“The cost to send the package to that location, overnight, is $398,” she said, almost as an aside.

Whaaaaat? I decided to cancel the whole damned thing. I called Alexis to apologize (she felt worse than I did), emptied the mammoth box of Chinese food on our kitchen counter, and told Phil to dive in.

Needless to say, we ate little. There was much more food than we could eat even in four sittings, so I recommended Phil take it to our auto mechanic, who works hard and might appreciate a free meal for a million people. He, in fact, was delighted, Phil later reported.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned one big lesson from this fiasco: Before attempting to perform a good deed, do your homework. The devil is indeed in the details.

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 37 years. Her columns appear here Sundays. She is the author of the book, “Comfort is an Old Barn,” a collection of her curated columns, published in 2023 by Islandport Press. She may be reached at [email protected]. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com.