The Day I Shouted Obarey at Work

There are achievements that require a formal response.

You shake hands.

You send an email.

You update your CV.

You say thank you.

Then there are achievements that bypass language entirely.

In July 2010, I apparently had three levels of celebration.

For an ordinary success:

“Yes!”

I liked the English word because it came out of the mouth quickly and seemed to carry enough force.

“Evet” did not work for me.

It sounded too much like answering a question.

“Do you want tea?”

Evet.

Not victory.

“Oley” was available, but I considered it too childish.

So “yes” occupied the middle category.

Compact.

Sharp.

Efficient.

But if the achievement was truly large, “yes” was insufficient.

For those moments there was a superior expression:

“Obareyyyy!”

And I had evidence.

When I learned that I had become an Ekşi Sözlük writer, I shouted “obareyyyyy” at work.

Loudly enough that the project manager, sitting in his office four or five meters away, came out to investigate.

His question was:

“What happened? Is it working or something?”

That was the scene.

I had become a writer on a website.

The project manager heard a victory cry and naturally assumed that some technical problem had finally been solved.

Both interpretations make sense.

We were at work.

People usually do not scream with joy because an internet community has granted them membership.

But this was Ekşi Sözlük.

And in that period, becoming a writer did not feel like simply creating another account.

You did not necessarily arrive, choose a username, enter an email address, and immediately receive the same status as everyone else.

There was a threshold.

There was waiting.

There was the feeling that you were outside and wanted to get inside.

When the threshold finally disappeared, the emotion could be surprisingly large compared with the objective event.

Objectively:

A website changed my status.

Subjectively:

Obareyyyy.

That difference is what makes the memory worth keeping.

The internet used to contain more doors.

Not because access itself was technically difficult.

Because communities often created layers.

Reader.

Candidate.

Member.

Writer.

Moderator.

Invited user.

Verified user.

Different sites invented different hierarchies.

These distinctions created status inside worlds that did not physically exist.

No office.

No clubhouse.

No membership card in your wallet.

Yet the borders felt real.

You could be outside a community while reading it every day.

You could know its language.

Its jokes.

Its habits.

Its famous users.

Its arguments.

Still not fully belong.

Then one day the system says:

Fine.

Come in.

That can feel absurdly important.

Especially when you have spent enough time waiting for it.

The archive contains another small clue about the waiting period elsewhere: I had once described becoming a writer after a long period as something people might brag about.

I do not need to reconstruct the whole path here.

This story is about the moment of discovery.

I learned the status had changed.

My body selected the largest available celebration word.

Obarey.

The project manager emerged.

That image captures something I miss about older internet culture.

Online events could still produce very offline reactions.

You sat at a computer.

Something happened on the screen.

Then you shouted into a real room.

Someone nearby reacted.

The digital and physical worlds collided.

Today we sometimes speak as though life moved “online.”

But it never really left the room.

Screens have always been surrounded by chairs, desks, offices, families, coworkers, cups of tea, cigarettes, noises from the next room.

A message arrives digitally.

The face changes physically.

A result appears.

Someone jumps.

An acceptance email comes.

Someone calls their mother.

A website grants writer status.

Someone yells “obareyyyyy” loudly enough to summon management.

The internet was never separate from life.

It simply entered life through rectangles.

What makes this scene especially funny is the project manager’s assumption.

He heard celebration.

He did not ask:

Did something good happen?

He apparently asked whether “it” was working.

That is a very workplace-specific interpretation of joy.

In a technical office, happiness needs a bug.

If an engineer suddenly celebrates, one likely explanation is that something previously broken has begun behaving.

The build succeeded.

The device responded.

The test passed.

The program finally ran.

Something worked.

That is reasonable.

Professional environments teach us to map emotion onto expected causes.

Sudden silence?

Problem.

Loud swearing?

Problem.

Someone laughing alone at a screen?

Probably not work.

Someone shouting victory?

Maybe it finally works.

Instead:

I got into Ekşi Sözlük.

There is no evidence in the source about what the manager thought after learning the real reason.

That part is missing, and it should stay missing.

I only have the line he used when he came out.

That is enough.

It is better than inventing a reaction.

The scene already ends at exactly the right place.

What happened?

Is it working?

Not exactly.

But also, in a way, yes.

Something had worked.

Persistence.

Waiting.

Whatever process stood between candidate and writer had ended.

The system had accepted me.

That was my bug fix.

The original entry was actually about celebration words, not Ekşi Sözlük itself.

That is another reason I like it.

The autobiographical detail appears as an example.

“Use ‘obarey’ for very large successes. For example…”

Then suddenly there is a workplace memory.

This happens often in old archives.

You go looking for one subject and discover your life hiding inside a parenthesis.

The title may be generic.

The memory is specific.

That is why personal archives are difficult to classify.

A post about saying “yes” becomes evidence of a career-era office.

An entry about student breakfast becomes the story of learning to drink soda.

A product review becomes a memory of moving around a house attached to ten meters of headphone cable.

The declared topic is not always the real topic.

Time changes what the text is about.

In 2010, the point may have been:

Here is my preferred hierarchy of celebration words.

Now the point is:

I once cared enough about becoming an Ekşi Sözlük writer that I shouted at work.

Both are true.

The second simply took longer to reveal itself.

There is something charming about the seriousness with which I ranked the words.

“Yes” had advantages.

Fast.

Effective.

“Evet” failed because of its ordinary grammatical role.

“Oley” failed because it sounded childish.

“Obarey” was reserved for major events.

This is personal language design.

Everyone does some version of it.

Families have words.

Friend groups have words.

Workplaces have words.

Some expressions are borrowed from television.

Some from a friend.

Some from childhood.

Some appear for no clear reason and survive for years.

Eventually a person has a private emotional vocabulary that cannot be fully explained by dictionaries.

Two words may both mean celebration but belong to completely different levels.

Nice.

Great.

YES.

OBAREY.

Language is not only meaning.

It is force.

Some words leave the mouth better.

That was my argument for “yes.”

I still understand it.

Success often wants a short vowel and a hard ending.

You do not want a paragraph at the exact moment something works.

The emotional system needs a button.

Press.

Yes!

Then perhaps explanation.

The larger the surprise, however, the less standard language can feel.

That is where nonsense words become useful.

Obarey does not need a definition.

It is shaped like excitement.

Stretch the final vowel and the intensity increases automatically.

Obareyyyyyyyy.

No punctuation required.

The body understands.

The manager certainly did.

He came out of his office.

This also tells us something about office acoustics.

Four or five meters is not far.

The source preserves that distance.

I like the precision.

Not simply “my manager heard me.”

He was four or five meters away in his office and came out.

Small numbers build physical memory.

Suddenly the workplace has dimensions.

I do not know the exact layout.

I should not invent walls, doors, desks, or coworkers.

But I know there was an office close enough that a shouted word crossed the distance.

The project manager had enough curiosity to investigate.

That is the entire stage.

Computer.

Me.

Four or five meters.

Office.

Obarey.

Manager appears.

It almost writes itself.

The date matters too.

2010.

Social platforms were already central to online life, but the web still felt more fragmented into distinct cultures.

A forum was one world.

A blog community another.

Ekşi Sözlük another.

Facebook another.

Twitter was becoming another.

Identity did not yet feel fully flattened into the same profile replicated everywhere.

Communities had local customs.

Local prestige.

Local language.

Belonging somewhere specific could matter.

Becoming a writer therefore had meaning inside that particular ecosystem.

Someone outside it might not understand at all.

That contrast is present in the office scene.

My internal scale:

major achievement.

Project manager’s scale:

perhaps the software works.

The same shout means different things depending on which world you are standing in.

This is true of almost every hobby.

Tell a person outside the hobby that you found a rare item, reached a ranking, got invited somewhere, received a badge, finished an absurdly difficult game, or had something featured by a community.

They may say:

Nice.

Inside the hobby, everyone knows.

This is how subcultures create value.

Value does not need to be universal to be real.

A football match matters because people agree that it matters.

A degree matters because institutions agree.

A rare collectible matters because collectors agree.

Internet reputation works the same way.

A status transition on a website can mean almost nothing globally and a great deal locally.

Humans are extremely good at creating worlds and then caring about the rules inside them.

Perhaps that sounds dismissive.

I do not mean it that way.

Most meaning is socially constructed at some level.

The important question is not whether everyone understands your excitement.

It is whether the excitement was genuine.

Mine apparently was.

There is no faking a shout that brings the project manager out of his room.

That is strong evidence.

The memory also exposes how quickly celebration can become embarrassment.

The source ends with advice:

Do not shout too much at work.

That warning implies the obvious.

The victory cry was perhaps better suited to somewhere else.

But embarrassment often follows authentic joy because joy temporarily removes self-monitoring.

For a second you forget where you are.

Then:

Oh.

Office.

People.

Manager.

This is one reason spontaneous reactions are so memorable.

Planned celebration is controlled.

Spontaneous celebration reveals ranking.

What matters enough to make you forget the room?

Apparently, at that moment, writer status.

The mature reaction is easy:

Really?

That?

But I do not want to mock the younger self too much.

He was excited.

Let him be excited.

One of the less attractive habits of getting older is retroactively downgrading old joys.

That was silly.

That was childish.

That did not matter.

Why do that?

The event mattered then.

That is sufficient.

A life made only from achievements that still seem important twenty years later would be terribly narrow.

We should be allowed obsolete victories.

The first salary.

A game completed.

A forum invitation.

A driver’s license.

A computer upgrade.

A message from someone we liked.

A website accepting us.

A project finally compiling.

The world later changes the scale.

Memory should not.

There is a special sweetness in remembering what once felt enormous.

It tells us how our world was sized.

At that point, becoming an Ekşi Sözlük writer occupied enough space in mine to deserve “obarey,” not merely “yes.”

Good.

The archive exists partly because that acceptance happened.

Once inside, I wrote.

And years later, those entries became material for reconstructing pieces of my life.

There is a beautiful circularity there.

The moment that caused me to shout at work eventually helped preserve the person who shouted.

If I had never become a writer, perhaps many of these tiny stories would never have been written down.

The student apartment.

The teacher.

The car.

The office.

The military exam.

The soda.

The headphones.

The strange phone call.

All those fragments survived because there was somewhere to put them.

That makes the 2010 celebration more consequential in retrospect than I could have known.

Not because becoming an Ekşi Sözlük writer was a major public achievement.

Because it created a habit of leaving traces.

You do not know which casual sentence will become valuable later.

At the time, you write because something is funny.

Annoying.

Interesting.

Worth arguing about.

Years later, the archive gives you back a room.

A voice.

A person.

A price.

A route.

A date.

This is why the smallest records matter.

The archive remembers the exact expression.

Obareyyyyy.

Not “I was happy.”

That is much better.

“I was happy” is information.

“Obareyyyyy” is sound.

You can almost hear it crossing four or five meters.

You can almost see the project manager emerge.

What happened?

Is it working?

And perhaps that is the best possible question for an old memory.

Is it still working?

Yes.

Apparently it is.