The Engineer Who Took Us to the Balcony Every Hour

Some people are remembered through important achievements.

Others survive in memory through habits nobody would ever put on a résumé.

In August 2009, I wrote twice about a colleague or friend named Fuat Ulubatlı.

The entries are brief, but together they produce a surprisingly complete portrait.

He was the person who added How I Met Your Mother to my television-series archive.

I had also spent two months trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade him to sell me his Ford Focus.

He was cheerful.

An engineer with what I called a leadership spirit.

He did not smoke.

And yet, for reasons I apparently could not explain, he took us out to the balcony roughly once every hour.

The next day I added another entry.

He sent cartoons every day and made us laugh so much that, in my exaggerated description, our cheeks moved toward our ears.

Then came an edit:

He was in the military now.

That was all.

Two tiny entries.

A television series.

A car he would not sell.

A balcony.

Cartoons.

A departure.

This is exactly the kind of material that becomes more interesting with time.

At the moment of writing, I was not trying to preserve an era.

I was describing a person I saw often enough that his habits still felt ordinary.

Years later, those habits are the era.

The first thing I notice is the television series.

Today, recommending a show is effortless.

Send a link.

Mention the title.

The other person opens a streaming service and starts.

In 2009, the phrase “added it to my series archive” meant something more physical.

Files had to exist somewhere.

Episodes took disk space.

Someone had collected them.

Copied them.

Organized them.

Passed them along.

Media traveled socially.

One person’s hard drive could change another person’s evenings for months.

That made recommendations more involved.

You did not only say:

You should watch this.

You sometimes arrived carrying the thing itself.

A drive.

A folder.

A stack of files.

Subtitles, if necessary.

The recommendation contained labor.

That gave it weight.

Fuat did not merely tell me about How I Met Your Mother.

According to the old entry, he brought it into my archive.

The series became part of my personal media world because he was the bridge.

This is one of the quiet ways people alter each other’s lives.

Not through major advice.

Through introductions.

A song.

A series.

A restaurant.

A book.

A shortcut.

A piece of software.

A person.

Someone says:

Try this.

Years later, the introduced thing may remain while the introducing moment disappears.

Sometimes even the introducer disappears from daily life.

But the connection remains hidden inside the preference.

We rarely keep track of these origins.

Who first played that band for me?

Who told me about that film?

Who showed me that café?

Who taught me that shortcut?

Culture spreads through small acts of friendship.

The archive occasionally preserves the source.

Fuat gave me How I Met Your Mother.

Good.

Credit restored.

Then there was the Ford Focus.

For two months, I had apparently been trying to convince him to sell it to me.

He refused.

This makes me smile because only a few months later my archive contains my own Ford Focus entry.

So there was a period when the car was still an object of negotiation inside a friendship.

I wanted his.

He was not interested in my arguments.

The exact reasons are not preserved.

Maybe he liked the car.

Maybe the price was wrong.

Maybe he simply enjoyed refusing me.

Any of those would fit normal friendship, but the source does not say, so the refusal stays unexplained.

That is enough.

There is comedy in repeated persuasion.

The first time:

Would you sell it?

No.

A week later:

Think about it.

No.

Later:

Come on.

No.

After two months, the refusal itself becomes part of the relationship.

Certain arguments between friends stop being attempts to change the outcome.

They become rituals.

You already know the answer.

You ask anyway.

The other person knows you know.

He refuses again.

Everybody is playing their part.

Friendships are full of these recurring negotiations.

Sell me your car.

Give me that book.

Come with us.

Stop doing that.

You will never use this, give it to me.

The point eventually becomes less important than the repetition.

This is how private comedy forms.

But the detail that most interests me is the balcony.

Fuat did not smoke.

Yet once an hour, somehow, he took us outside to the balcony.

This is a perfect workplace memory.

It makes no sense until you understand office life.

Smokers have always possessed one great professional advantage:

They have a socially recognized reason to leave the desk.

Nobody questions the cigarette break quite the same way they question:

I would like to stand outside for five minutes and look at nothing.

The smoker says:

Cigarette.

Fine.

The non-smoker has to invent philosophy.

Fresh air.

Coffee.

Stretching.

Thinking.

Phone call.

But in many workplaces, smoking breaks become informal social institutions.

People gather.

Talk.

Complain.

Exchange information.

Laugh.

Sometimes solve problems.

Sometimes avoid them.

The cigarette is partly the excuse.

The balcony is the real location.

So a non-smoker who reliably brings everyone to the balcony every hour has understood something important.

The break matters independently of the cigarette.

I did not phrase it that way in 2009.

I only found the behavior amusing.

Why does this man, who does not even smoke, keep taking us outside?

Years later, the answer seems obvious.

Because work has rhythm.

Human beings are not designed to stare at the same surface for eight uninterrupted hours.

We need transitions.

Small exits.

A change of air.

A conversation that has no agenda.

Workplace friendship often happens in these margins rather than inside official tasks.

Corridors.

Tea rooms.

Balconies.

Lunch queues.

Parking lots.

The five minutes before a meeting.

The walk downstairs.

This is where people stop being job titles.

A formal meeting tells you what someone thinks about the project.

A balcony tells you what they think about everything else.

That distinction matters.

You can work beside someone for years and know almost nothing about them if every interaction is task-shaped.

Then one day you stand outside for ten minutes and discover the person.

This is one reason remote work changed professional relationships so dramatically years later.

The scheduled interaction survived.

The accidental one became harder.

You can reproduce meetings online.

You cannot easily reproduce:

Come on, balcony.

That phrase contains no objective.

That is precisely its value.

The old entry calls Fuat “leader-spirited.”

I do not know whether that referred to his formal role or simply his personality.

But the balcony detail makes the description plausible in a social sense.

Leadership is not always making decisions from the front of a room.

Sometimes it is creating movement.

Everybody is tired.

One person stands up.

Come on.

Five minutes.

And somehow everyone follows.

That is leadership too.

Not strategic.

Not managerial.

Human.

Groups often need somebody who gives permission for the obvious thing.

We should take a break.

We should eat.

We should stop arguing.

We should laugh.

We should go outside.

The person who says it changes the room.

The next day’s entry strengthens this portrait.

Fuat sent cartoons every day.

Again, this feels intensely of its time.

Before every office conversation moved through endless group chats and social feeds, there was a strong culture of forwarded material.

Email chains.

Cartoons.

Jokes.

Images.

PowerPoint files of questionable origin.

Something funny arrived in one inbox and spread across the office.

A person’s informal identity could partly be built from what they forwarded.

There was always someone.

The joke person.

The news person.

The strange-video person.

The person whose messages you opened because they were usually worth it.

Fuat, apparently, was one of those.

He made us laugh every day.

The old sentence is exaggerated:

He caused our cheeks to migrate toward our ears.

That is better than saying he had a good sense of humor.

Specific affection usually arrives through exaggeration.

This is something the archive teaches repeatedly.

When I genuinely liked someone, I often did not write:

He is a valued friend.

I wrote:

This man is a magnificent lunatic who does X, Y, and Z.

Affection disguised itself as mockery.

That tone is especially common in male friendships.

Direct emotional language can feel too exposed.

So praise enters through jokes.

He is a “yavru kurt.”

A young wolf.

A ridiculous title.

But obviously affectionate.

The first entry calls him a “great man” for giving me a television series.

Again, intentionally disproportionate.

Friendship uses absurd scale.

Someone shares a show.

Hero.

Someone buys tea.

Legend.

Someone covers your shift.

King.

The exaggeration is the affection.

Outsiders can misunderstand this language because they read the literal content.

Friends hear the actual message.

I like you.

You make the day better.

That is what both entries say without saying it cleanly.

And then comes the edit.

“He is in the military now.”

Four words can change the atmosphere of an entry.

Until then, Fuat is fully present.

He sends cartoons.

He takes us to the balcony.

He refuses to sell the car.

He is part of daily repetition.

Then:

Now he is in the military.

The verb tense changes.

The workplace continues.

The person is elsewhere.

This is one of the most ordinary forms of loss.

Not tragedy.

Interruption.

Someone leaves for military service.

Another job.

Another city.

A project.

Marriage.

Graduate school.

A long assignment.

The group remains, but one of its routines disappears.

You notice not necessarily because the person had a dramatic role.

You notice at the time when their habit would normally happen.

Eleven o’clock.

Nobody says:

Balcony?

An email arrives.

Not from him.

The car is no longer in the parking lot.

Absence often enters through missing repetition.

This is why habits become emotionally important without our noticing.

A colleague’s greeting.

A friend’s call.

A parent’s noise in the kitchen.

A child’s toys on the floor.

The thing itself may be mildly annoying while present.

When it stops, the silence has shape.

The archive does not explicitly say that the office felt different after Fuat left.

I should not invent that reaction.

But the edit exists because the change mattered enough to append.

He is in the military now.

The previous description has become slightly historical.

That is the beginning of memory.

One day someone is simply part of the office.

The next day you are already describing what they used to do.

Time can turn present tense into past tense with almost no ceremony.

This is especially visible in workplaces because professional communities are temporary by design.

People join.

Sit beside you.

Become part of lunch.

Part of jokes.

Part of frustration.

You learn their coffee.

Their phrases.

Their bad habits.

Their preferred browser.

The way they answer the phone.

Then one person leaves.

At first the absence is obvious.

Later someone else sits there.

A year passes.

The team changes.

Eventually the entire office you remember no longer exists.

Not the building, necessarily.

The human arrangement.

That version cannot be reconstructed.

Even if everyone returned to the same desks, they would be different people.

This is why old workplace memories become strangely tender.

At the time, you think the job is the central thing.

Projects.

Deadlines.

Customers.

Management.

Years later, often the projects blur first.

The people remain.

You may forget what module you were implementing.

You remember who made everyone laugh.

You remember the balcony.

This is almost unfair to work.

Organizations invest enormous effort in formal structure.

Project plans.

Processes.

Deliverables.

Performance reviews.

Documentation.

Then memory walks away carrying the five-minute break.

Human memory is disrespectful toward institutional priorities.

Good.

It reminds us what life actually felt like.

There is another small detail in the first entry: I called Fuat cheerful.

“Güleryüzüyle içimizi ısıtan.”

His smiling face warmed us.

That is unusually direct compared with the jokes around it.

It tells me the humor was not only entertainment.

There was an atmosphere around the person.

Some colleagues make work heavier.

Others make the same workload easier merely by how they inhabit the room.

This should not be romanticized into the idea that personality can fix a bad workplace.

It cannot.

Good colleagues do not compensate indefinitely for poor management, impossible hours, or unfair conditions.

But people matter.

A day beside someone pleasant and a day beside someone hostile are not the same day.

Work is social exposure.

We spend enormous portions of life near people we did not choose.

That makes kindness disproportionately valuable.

A smiling person.

A joke.

A balcony break.

These can sound trivial until you calculate how many hours adults spend at work.

Then they are not trivial at all.

A cheerful colleague can influence hundreds of days.

That is a substantial contribution even if no performance metric records it.

Modern organizations like to speak about culture as though it can be deliberately constructed from policies.

Some of it can.

But much of culture is simply people repeating themselves.

The person who always helps.

The person who always complains.

The person who sends cartoons.

The person who calls everyone outside.

The person who explains things without humiliating beginners.

The person who makes meetings worse.

These repeated micro-behaviors accumulate into the emotional truth of a workplace.

No mission statement can override them.

If the posters say “collaboration” and everyone is afraid to ask questions, the culture is fear.

If the office is chaotic but people reliably help one another, the culture may still be humane.

Fuat’s entries are tiny pieces of that bottom-up culture.

No corporate language.

Just:

He makes us laugh.

He takes us to the balcony.

That tells me more than a values page.

The Ford Focus detail also links personal and professional life in a way offices often do.

Colleagues do not remain inside job boundaries.

You learn what car they own.

What series they watch.

Where they travel.

Who they support.

What food they hate.

What they want to buy.

Who is getting married.

Who is leaving for military service.

People leak beyond roles.

That leakage is how colleagues become friends.

Perhaps the two-month campaign to buy his Focus happened partly because proximity makes possessions social.

You see the car often.

Ride in it, perhaps — though the source does not say, so I should not claim that.

You hear about it.

It becomes familiar.

Eventually:

Sell it to me.

This is how workplace communities develop their own small economies.

Used cars.

Phones.

Furniture.

Recommendations.

Apartments.

Technicians.

Doctors.

Someone always knows someone.

Trust circulates through the network.

The old entry preserves only the failed transaction.

He did not sell.

Fair enough.

A few months later I bought another Focus anyway.

So perhaps Fuat had done me a favor by refusing.

Or perhaps not.

The archive cannot tell me.

I like leaving that unresolved.

Not every friend needs to become secretly wise in retrospect.

Maybe he simply wanted his car.

There is a tendency in memoir to upgrade every past figure into a teacher.

“The lesson he taught me.”

“The wisdom I learned.”

This can become artificial.

Some people were not teachers.

They were companions.

That is enough.

Fuat does not need to symbolize leadership, friendship, work-life balance, or the importance of laughter.

Those themes can emerge from the memory, but the person should remain more specific than the lesson.

He sent cartoons.

He did not smoke.

He took people to the balcony anyway.

He would not sell me the Focus.

That is Fuat in the archive.

Specificity protects him from becoming a motivational poster.

This may be why funny memories age well.

Serious summaries become generic.

“He was a good friend.”

There are millions of good friends.

“He did not smoke but somehow took us to the balcony every hour.”

Now there is a person.

A strange detail gives memory fingerprints.

This is exactly what happened with Hüsamettin the cockroach, the friend who took forever to make a chess move, my father leaving the dishes after cooking, and so many other entries.

Memory likes unnecessary details.

They are unnecessary only from the outside.

From inside a relationship, they are identity.

If somebody asked me today to write a formal paragraph about a colleague from 2009, I might struggle.

What project?

What exact title?

What responsibilities?

The archive answers a different question:

What did being around him feel like?

Laughter.

Balcony.

Television.

Car arguments.

That may be the better question.

Because careers are documented elsewhere.

HR systems preserve job titles.

CVs preserve roles.

Project repositories preserve technical work.

Personal archives should preserve what those systems cannot.

Who made you laugh?

Who irritated you?

Who kept the office human?

Who disappeared for military service and made you add an edit?

That is the information most likely to vanish.

It is also the information most likely to matter later.

The phrase “he is in the military now” makes me think about how temporary separations felt before messaging became as continuous as it is now.

People could still communicate, obviously.

But the sense of presence was different.

Someone leaving physically could create a much clearer break in routine.

Today, social media keeps people ambiently present.

You see updates.

Photos.

Messages.

Statuses.

Physical absence remains, but informational absence is weaker.

Earlier digital life had gaps.

A person could leave the office and become substantially less visible.

This gave returns more weight too.

Again, I should not invent what happened in this specific case.

But the era matters.

A workplace friend leaving was not automatically replaced by watching their daily life online.

There was more room for absence.

Perhaps that is why small written entries functioned partly as social preservation.

You wrote about someone.

The entry stayed while the person was elsewhere.

That is one of the hidden functions of platforms like Ekşi Sözlük in personal history.

Public writing accidentally became private archive.

At the time, the entry addressed readers.

Years later, it addresses the writer.

Remember this person?

Remember why you liked him?

Remember the ridiculous balcony thing?

Yes.

Now I do.

That is the gift.

The title itself is only his name.

No attempt to announce significance.

Most meaningful people in our lives never receive dramatic titles while they are present.

They are simply names.

The significance accumulates around them later.

This makes me wonder how many people we know today through equally small habits we are not recording.

The colleague who always brings something sweet.

The neighbor who feeds the street cats.

The friend who always sends a message after a difficult day.

The person who never lets a silence become awkward.

We assume we will remember.

We usually remember less than we think.

The broad outline stays.

The exact behavior goes.

Archives rescue behavior.

Perhaps that is enough reason to write small portraits while people are still nearby.

Not obituaries.

Not tributes.

Just observations.

He does this.

She always says that.

We laugh when this happens.

These details can look meaningless now.

They may become the only surviving doorway later.

Fuat’s two entries are only a few lines.

They contain no grand event.

Yet I can feel a workplace through them.

People working.

Someone forwarding cartoons.

Someone standing up once an hour.

The group moving toward the balcony.

A car I wanted.

A television series being copied.

Then one day:

He is in the military now.

That is life in miniature.

Routine.

Affection.

Absence.

No grand conclusion required.

If there is a lesson, it is almost embarrassingly simple:

The people who make ordinary days better often do it through things too small to appreciate while they are happening.

A joke.

A recommendation.

Five minutes outside.

You notice the pattern most clearly when it stops.

And years later, you may not remember the meeting you had that afternoon.

But you remember who said:

Come on.

Balcony.