Four and a Half Hours Across Ankara

On the morning of 19 July 2010, I left home at around 8:30.

By roughly 1:00 in the afternoon, I had managed to do all of the following:

Complete my military dispatch procedure.

Cancel the telephone and ADSL service.

Cancel the water.

Cancel the electricity.

Return home once to read the electricity meter.

Visit the electricity office again.

And finally make it to a friend’s house in Balgat.

Four and a half hours.

In Ankara.

I considered it a record.

I still do.

The route, as I wrote it down that day, was almost more satisfying than the achievement itself:

Dikimevi military branch.

İncesu telecom office.

Başkent Elektrik.

Home in Dikimevi.

ASKİ.

Başkent Elektrik again.

Then a friend’s house in Balgat.

That is not an itinerary.

That is a bureaucratic obstacle course.

There are mornings when you leave home with one task and return exhausted.

This was the opposite.

I had several tasks that could each have ruined a day independently, and somehow they all surrendered before lunch.

That kind of success creates a strange euphoria.

Not because any individual task is impressive.

Nobody puts “successfully cancelled water service” on a CV.

But administrative life has its own difficulty scale.

One counter can destroy an afternoon.

One missing photocopy can reset the game.

One signature can send you to another building.

One person can say:

You need to go there first.

And “there” is never next door.

So when everything works, the feeling is disproportionate.

You start to believe you have mastered civilization.

The old entry was titled around trivial achievements.

I immediately objected to my own title.

This was not trivial, I wrote.

Doing all of that in Ankara in about four and a half hours looked like a record to me.

The younger version of me was proud.

Fairly proud.

There is a kind of competence that adult life never teaches formally.

Knowing how to get things done.

Not the important things people put in books.

The irritating things.

Where to go.

Which office handles what.

Which document to bring.

When to leave.

When to ask.

When to insist.

How to cross a city efficiently enough that one administrative task does not consume the entire day.

This competence is invisible until you lack it.

As a child, utilities simply exist.

Water comes from the tap.

Electricity comes from the socket.

Telephone works.

Later, perhaps the internet works too.

Nobody explains the administrative skeleton behind them.

Someone opened the account.

Someone signed something.

Someone pays.

Someone knows which institution to call when it breaks.

Then adulthood arrives and suddenly water has paperwork.

Electricity has paperwork.

Telephone has paperwork.

Even stopping a service requires a procedure.

Existence has customer numbers.

The most revealing detail in my morning is the return home to read the electricity meter.

I had already gone to Başkent Elektrik.

Then apparently I needed the meter reading.

So I went back to the apartment in Dikimevi.

Read the meter.

Then went to ASKİ.

Then returned to Başkent Elektrik.

This is exactly the sort of detail a modern retelling is tempted to remove because it damages the clean narrative.

Do not remove it.

That detour is the narrative.

Without it, the morning looks like good planning.

With it, it looks like real life.

Good planning meets one missing number.

Back home.

Read meter.

Continue.

Adults are constantly being defeated by information that exists five kilometers away.

You have the form but not the number.

The number but not the photocopy.

The photocopy but not the original.

The original but not the person authorized to sign.

Bureaucracy does not always stop you with large problems.

It prefers tiny absences.

The electricity meter reading was one of those.

But that morning even the detour failed to stop me.

That is why the day became worth writing down.

The first stop was the military branch in Dikimevi.

The source says only that I completed the military dispatch procedure there.

It does not preserve the queue, the forms, the conversations, or how long that stage took.

So I will not invent them.

The fact itself is enough.

Military dispatch.

Then telecom.

Then utilities.

The grouping of these tasks tells you that some transition was underway.

I do not need to claim more than the archive does.

I was dealing with military paperwork while closing household services.

That is the factual shape.

Whatever emotions surrounded that transition are not recorded in this entry.

The entry records something more practical:

Look how much I got done.

That practical tone is valuable.

Big life transitions are not experienced only through emotion.

They are experienced through errands.

This is often forgotten in memoir.

We like to narrate turning points as moments of realization.

The truth is often:

First, cancel the internet.

Then go to the water office.

Then read the meter.

Then try not to lose a document.

The emotional significance of a transition may be enormous.

Its calendar is still full of administrative chores.

Leaving a home, starting military service, changing a job, getting married, having a child, moving to another city — all the supposedly meaningful stages of adult life eventually produce forms.

Life says:

This chapter is ending.

The institution says:

Bring a photocopy.

The contrast can be funny.

It can also be grounding.

Paperwork translates abstract change into physical action.

Turn in this document.

Close this account.

Return this key.

Sign here.

The world begins to acknowledge that something is changing because databases start changing too.

Until then, a transition can feel private.

Afterward, the system knows.

There is another reason this morning feels distinctly 2010.

Many of these tasks required physical movement.

Office to office.

Neighborhood to neighborhood.

Dikimevi.

İncesu.

Electricity office.

Home.

ASKİ.

Electricity office again.

Balgat.

The city was part of the interface.

Today, many administrative tasks can be done online or at least partially online.

Not all, of course.

But enough that the idea of crossing Ankara to cancel multiple services feels more historical than it once did.

In 2010, the browser did not always replace the counter.

Your body moved the workflow.

Every completed task had geography.

You could draw the bureaucracy on a map.

This gives old administrative memories a peculiar urban texture.

The institutions become landmarks.

Not beautiful ones.

Functional ones.

You know a city differently when you have had to solve problems in it.

Tourists know monuments.

Residents know where to cancel the water.

That may be a better definition of belonging than many romantic ones.

You become local when the city stops being scenery and becomes a set of procedures.

Where is the telecom office?

Which bus gets me there?

Where do I pay this?

Which branch handles that district?

Which door?

Which floor?

Who do I ask?

The adult city is built from these questions.

On ordinary days, this knowledge feels like burden.

On a successful day, it feels like power.

I had apparently entered a rare state of administrative flow.

The next place appeared.

I went.

The task ended.

Next.

No catastrophe.

No lost day.

No “come back tomorrow.”

At least none that the entry records.

By one o’clock, I was done.

There is almost a sports mentality in the way I wrote it.

8:30 start.

13:00 finish.

Four and a half hours.

Record.

This is how boring tasks become tolerable.

Turn them into a challenge.

Can I finish before lunch?

Can I combine routes?

Can I beat the queue?

Can I do everything in one day?

Gamification existed before apps gave us badges.

People gamified misery naturally.

The reward was leaving the final office.

Achievement unlocked:

Electricity successfully cancelled.

That sounds ridiculous until you have spent three hours trying to cancel electricity.

Then it sounds heroic.

The city itself becomes the course.

Dikimevi to İncesu.

Then electricity.

Back to Dikimevi.

Then ASKİ.

Back to electricity.

Then Balgat.

Each movement costs time.

Ankara is not a small room.

A four-and-a-half-hour total means transportation and procedures somehow aligned.

I wish the archive preserved the exact transportation method.

It does not.

So I will not guess whether I drove, walked, used buses, taxis, or some combination.

The route is enough.

It tells us the scale without inventing the mechanism.

That restraint matters.

Memory writing becomes more trustworthy when blank spaces are allowed to remain blank.

We do not need to know everything.

We need to know what survived.

What survived was the sequence.

That suggests the sequence itself was the satisfaction.

I did not write:

Today I felt emotional about closing services.

I wrote:

Look at this list.

Look at the time.

That is a very engineer-like form of joy, though I should be careful not to reduce every memory to professional personality.

Lists are universally satisfying when they shrink.

The morning began with many open loops.

By one o’clock, almost all had closed.

Human attention likes closure.

An unfinished administrative task occupies far more mental space than it deserves.

You need to cancel the internet.

Small task.

But until it is done, it sits somewhere in the mind.

Remember internet.

Remember water.

Remember electricity.

Remember military paperwork.

Remember meter.

Remember this.

Remember that.

The brain becomes a waiting room.

Then one by one:

Done.

Done.

Done.

Done.

Mental silence returns.

That may be the real pleasure behind productive mornings.

Not achievement.

Subtraction.

You remove obligations from your future.

By lunchtime, tomorrow is lighter.

This is why crossing off a boring task can feel better than beginning an exciting one.

The exciting task creates more future.

The boring task disappears.

There is a purity to disappearance.

Telephone account: closed.

ADSL: closed.

Water: closed.

Electricity: closed.

No need to think about them again, at least in the form they had that morning.

The apartment itself appears only once in the route:

Dikimevi home.

Go back.

Read meter.

Leave again.

That is strangely poignant now.

A home can become an errand stop while you are still technically connected to it.

For years, perhaps, a place is where life happens.

Then during a transition it becomes:

Need meter number.

Need to pick something up.

Need to hand over key.

Need to clean.

Need to close account.

The emotional center turns logistical.

Again, the entry does not explicitly say I was leaving that apartment permanently, so I should not state that as fact.

But the act of closing several services clearly placed the home inside an administrative transition.

The source supports that much.

And transitions often make familiar spaces look different.

The same wall.

Same meter.

Same door.

But now you are collecting data from them.

The meter is no longer part of the background.

It has become a number required somewhere else.

Objects become paperwork.

There is something almost comic about returning to an electricity office with the knowledge acquired from your own wall.

I have seen the meter.

I bring its message.

Let there be cancellation.

Bureaucracy has ancient ritual energy when described correctly.

There are temples.

Counters.

Numbers.

Seals.

Officials.

Offerings of photocopies.

You travel between them carrying sacred information.

One digit wrong and the gods become angry.

I exaggerate.

Only slightly.

The old Turkish administrative experience often depended on physical proof.

The correct paper.

The correct office.

The correct sequence.

People became informal experts because official procedures were not always intuitive.

Ask someone older.

Ask the clerk.

Ask the person in line.

Everyone had folklore.

Go early.

Use this branch.

Take two photocopies.

Do that first.

Don’t forget the meter.

Civil society transmitted bureaucracy orally.

That is another thing online systems changed.

When procedures move into digital interfaces, the instructions can become standardized.

The burden changes from navigating people to navigating screens.

Not necessarily easier.

Just a different kind of frustration.

Old frustration:

You came to the wrong building.

New frustration:

The button is disabled and nobody knows why.

Progress is complicated.

But geography matters less.

My 2010 morning would be a very different story if each cancellation had happened in a browser tab.

Click.

Confirm.

Download PDF.

Next.

Efficient.

Forgettable.

The inconvenience helped create the memory.

That is the unfair bargain of modern convenience.

We remove friction and also remove stories.

Nobody writes:

Today I successfully clicked four buttons.

But make someone cross Ankara twice because of an electricity meter and suddenly we have narrative.

Friction produces chronology.

First this.

Then that.

Then back.

Then there.

The city becomes visible through resistance.

Perhaps this is why some of the strongest memories from early adulthood involve things going slightly wrong.

Not catastrophically.

Just enough.

Enough to require improvisation.

Enough to make the final success feel earned.

If everything had been perfectly planned and instantly completed, I might not have written the entry.

The fact that I considered it a record tells us my expectation was different.

I expected Ankara bureaucracy to win at least one round.

It did not.

Not that morning.

There is also a final destination:

a friend’s house in Balgat.

This is an understated ending.

After military branch, telecom, electricity, home, water, electricity again — friend.

The administrative sequence gives way to a human place.

I like that the list ends there.

Again, the source does not tell us why I went to the friend’s house or what happened afterward.

No invention.

But structurally, it feels right.

Institutions all morning.

Then a person.

Perhaps that is the proper order for any successful bureaucratic day.

Finish with someone who does not require a queue number.

The entry is from July 2010.

I was still writing with the amused confidence of someone who had beaten the clock.

Four and a half hours.

Ankara.

Record.

Years later, the accomplishment remains wonderfully unimportant.

No career changed because of it.

No award.

No certificate.

No historical event.

And yet I understand exactly why I wrote it down.

Adult life is made of many achievements too small to celebrate publicly.

Getting every errand done.

Finding the missing document.

Fixing the thing yourself.

Making all the connections.

Reaching home before rain.

Cooking something correctly without a recipe.

Getting a child back to sleep.

Closing five administrative loops before lunch.

These victories deserve somewhere to exist.

Formal history ignores them.

Personal archives do not have to.

A life described only through major milestones becomes falsely dramatic.

Graduation.

Job.

Marriage.

Children.

Moves.

Losses.

Achievements.

Those are chapter titles.

But the pages are made from mornings like this.

8:30.

Leave home.

Dikimevi military branch.

İncesu telecom office.

Başkent Elektrik.

Back home for the meter.

ASKİ.

Başkent Elektrik again.

Balgat.

13:00.

Done.

There is almost no philosophy required.

Sometimes the memory itself is enough.

I crossed Ankara, defeated several administrative systems, corrected my own missing information mid-route, and still arrived at a friend’s place around lunchtime.

For one morning in 2010, adulthood worked exactly as advertised.