Obarey
Published:
I had a system for celebrating success.
Small success: “Yes!”
Very large success: “Obarey!”
The second category was rare.
One day at work, I looked at the screen and discovered that an online community I had been waiting to join had finally accepted me as a writer.
My body made the decision before my professional judgment had time to interfere.
“OBAREYYYY!”
The project manager was only a few meters away. He came out of his office immediately.
“What happened?” he asked. “Is it working?”
This was a reasonable question.
In a technical office, sudden happiness usually means that something broken has finally started behaving.
A program runs.
A test passes.
A device responds.
An engineer shouts.
The system is restored.
I had to explain that nothing at work had been fixed.
A website had changed my status.
Objectively, this was small.
Subjectively, it had required the maximum celebration word.
That is what I like about old victories. Their size belongs to the person who had them, not to the person remembering them years later.
At that moment, it mattered enough for me to forget I was in an office.
The internet had done something.
The room had heard about it.
The manager had come to investigate.
No bug was solved.
But something, apparently, was working.
Some words survive because nobody translates them. They are not useful outside the people who remember them, and that is exactly their value.
Private language is one of the proofs that a group existed. A joke, a nickname, a badly pronounced word, a sound repeated until it becomes a password.
Later, when the group is gone or changed, the word remains oddly charged.
It means nothing.
Which is another way of saying it means everything to the right people.
Inside Obarey
I like the memory most where it refuses to explain itself completely. A minor detail can be more faithful than a grand summary.
The smallness is not a weakness. It is the reason the memory can remain exact. I think the truth of the memory lives exactly in that uneven size.