Last Minuteness as an Art

                          Last Minuteness 

                                             as an Art

 Recently on the BBC World News website, there was an item headlined, "Turks growing skeptical of chances for EU membership." According to the article, many Turks say the government has lost the momentum it once showed when it made numerous reforms one after the other to the applause of the EU commissioners. One man interviewed warned that if Turkey doesn't pick up the ball soon, they can't possibly meet the deadlines set by the EU. Another man named Ahmet remarked,

"We are a country of people who put everything off until the last minute. When we are in school, we wait until the last night to study for an exam. Unfortunately, this tendency of ours often leads to less than wonderful results. As for preparing to meet the conditions of the EU, it may be our downfall."

I can vouch for the truth of Ahmet's remarks, and, as a teacher, especially to the part about putting off studying. Foreign residents witness the tendency regularly, particularly in the workplace. At the school I work at, putting things off is de rigueur. Sixteen years ago, in my first month of residence here, I was made to understand that this is the way that many Turks prefer to do things. 

In the school I was working at the teachers were told that they would have to prepare an exam to assess the English level of all students in the school. Ten days before the exam date I was sitting at a desk in the school office preparing some questions. The director, sitting across the room from me, asked what I was doing.

"I'm doing some multiple choice for our assessment exam," I told him. I had been hoping he would ask because I was eager to show him that his new teacher was responsible and hardworking.

"Oh, no, no, no!" he admonished. "It's much too soon for that. The exam isn't for two weeks. You don't need to start that till a couple of days before."

I thought he might be worried about the security of the questions, but that wasn't it. My eagerness and earliness had really only crossed with his preference- his love!- of doing these things just before they absolutely had to be done. In fact, as I observed him over three years, he would always wait until the morning of the exam- an hour or so before the students arrived- to work out classroom assignments for students, for teacher-invigilators, to make signs and name tags for these assignments, and to take care of countless other details for an exam like this. 

 At first, I likened his running around to a decapitated chicken, and described it as such in my journal. But the truth is that he was in control of everything and nothing was lost on him. That is, the exams went off without a hitch. Also, he was obviously happy- really, on a high- as he was doing all this stuff. After the exam I observed a blissful-like state, where he appeared to be gloating. He would be sitting and grinning, as if thinking, " Well, we pulled off another one, and we didn't work one more minute than was absolutely necessary." 

 Conventional wisdom tries to stop me, but I am going to say that our exam went as well as or better than if it had been prepared gradually in advance. I agree with Ahmet in the BBC interview when he implies that studying for an exam the last night can't bring about much success. But that's simply because learning has to occur over time. Most people cannot read a whole history or math book in one night and take it all in. Pulling off the assessment exam is a different sort of task. I'm not about to attempt any logical analysis here, but digging through my life experiences, I would say it's like writing a paper for school. When I was in university, it was my realization, and that of many of my friends, that papers (10-20 pages) were always much better when written in a spurt 2 or 3 days before they were due. In my first year, like the boy scout I was, I had started my papers wisely well in advance of their due date. These papers usually brought back A- or B+. But as I became less uptight in my second year, one day I found myself having to hand in a paper in 2 days time. The subject- constitutive rules in speech acts- was fairly demanding and precluded any thought of bullshitting. Chugging coffee continuously, I worked on it 36 hours without hardly getting up from my chair. It came back with an A+. 

Astonished that irresponsible behavior could bring such rewards, I repeated the technique. Again, gallons of caffeine slurped in a 24 hour writing binge scored another A. There was, I concluded, something to this approach. The reason these two papers were better than the ones I had written in my first year had to do with what we can call “flow". My first year papers suffered from having none when they were written: because they had been done over weeks in different moods, their style was uneven and their arguments disjointed. They had not been written with any momentum. The second year papers enjoyed the benefit from a sustained, deep concentration- helped no doubt by the highs from caffeine and fatigue- that produces good, consistent style and cogent, insightful arguments. 

 I want to say that for my director, it was this same kind of flow and momentum that produced such excellent results on exam day. Despite my university experience, I have rarely used the last minute strategy in my life. We Americans are dissuaded from this approach beginning day one of our school years. For Turks, on the other hand, there is no stigma. They prefer it, and they are also damn good at it. They are unequalled because for hundreds of years the techniques have been allowed to evolve and hone themselves. They are, truly, skillful and artful players. For example, a Turk doing my philosophy paper would make me look strictly amateur hour. He or she would start no more than 20 hours before its deadline, finish it at 4.45 p.m. on the day, rush to campus in a taxi, crash through the door of the professor'’s office and hand it to him just as he was picking up his car keys to go home. 

 There was one particular occasion of my life in Turkey when I found myself in the middle of one of these last-minute games played by a jouer extraordinaire. The experience was unforgettable. It could also serve as a paradigm of sorts for all those Turks wishing to move into the major leagues of this sport. 

The back story begins in Konya. One of the first things I wanted to do when I came to Turkey 16 years ago was to see the Whirling Dervishes. My interest was mostly touristic, but also I had read some things of Mevlana and thought he was an extraordinary man for his time.* My employers were able to get me tickets for their annual concert in Konya, the headquarters of the Dervish, and I made the 12 hour trip by bus in my first winter in Turkey. I was quite impressed by what I saw, so much so that I made the trip every year for three years. 

*Celaleddin Rumi, known as Mevlana, was a 13th century philosopher-religious mystic whose followers set up the Mevlana order- the Dervish- after his death. In their famous whirling dance, they leave their body, as in death, and become reunited with God, and reborn. There is a reference to death in their garb: the white dress is a shroud, and the tall, conical felt hat is a tombstone. Practitioners of this Islamic mysticism are known as Sufis.

During my third trip, I decided I wanted a Dervish hat, known as a Sikke. I had no idea when I arrived in Konya how I would locate the source of these hats, but of all people, the hotel porter happened to know the man who made the hats, and he led me to his workshop somewhere on a backstreet. The hat maker, named Mehmet, was not an old man with a beard as you might expect, but a 30ish guy who might have been a grad student. He had taken over the "business" from his father. He was, he explained to me, the only person in the world who could make the Dervish hat. I wasn't sure if he would make this special hat for a non-Dervish such as myself*, but he seemed quite pleased that I would want one and had one custom made to my head size ready the next day. 

*Later, I met a British girl at Mehmet's shop who had been sent by the University of Cambridge to study his hatmaking techniques. A hatmaker herself, she said the hat was extraordinary because it was just one piece of felt with no seams. She said she could not understand how to make one. 

 One summer I planned to fly to California and wanted to bring one of my friends a Dervish hat as a gift. About 6 weeks before my departure, I telephoned Mehmet and placed the order. My friend and I both seem to have bigger heads than the typical Dervish, so I asked him to make a hat for my head size. Mehmet said he would send the hat by post and that I would get it in the next 10 days. Two weeks before my departure, it hadn't arrived. I telephoned Mehmet and he assured me it would arrive in a few days. It didn't, as you surmise. Neither did it after my other 5 calls during the next 12 days. Thirty-six hours before my take off, I made a last telephone plea and- get this !- he asked me what size I wanted. He hadn't even started! 

 Nonetheless, he insisted I would get the hat before I left Turkey. Here was his plan: he would start making the hat in the morning, and when he finished in the afternoon, he would put it as cargo on a bus going to Istanbul, my initial destination. It would, he assured me, be waiting for me in my bus line's office when I arrived at about 6 in the morning. 

                This is a typical scene at the intercity bus station in Istanbul in the early 1990s

 I arrived at the bus station at 6.30. This was the old station, the extended part that was made up of hundreds of shacks housing bus firms and a myriad of criss-crossing dirt roads. The package wasn't there when I asked at the office, but the man called and found out that a bus from Konya was arriving at 7.00. I was supposed to be at the airport at 7.00 for my 8.00 flight, but I decided to wait. It was 25 minutes to the airport, and by now getting this hat was a life or death matter. There was no bus at 7.00, nor at 7.10, nor at 7.20. At this point the station manager had involved himself fully in my dilemma, and he had encouraged me at every 5-minute increment to wait just 5 minutes more. But at 7.25 I forced myself to give up the hat because I was in danger of losing my non-refundable tickets. I ran to a taxi and told the driver to speed to the airport. I was telling the driver my story- "...been waiting for a bus from Konya since 6.30...a Dervish hat for my friend in California...my plane leaves in 30 minutes..."- and just as I was finishing, he yelled, "Over there!" A couple of roads over, there was a bus pulling in off the main road. On its side, in smaller letters under the firm's name, was the word "Konya". We sped over. The taxi driver and I jumped out and both flailed our arms. The bus stopped. Without our saying anything, the bus steward stepped out, opened the cargo bay, pulled out a brown paper, cylindrical package and- here a Hollywood film would cut to slo-mo- threw it to me like a lateral pass in football. Then, after giving us only a small wave, he climbed back into the bus. 

 When I caught it, I had pulled it tightly to my chest, as though someone might try to grab it from me. I held it in this position, grinning, for the whole trip to the airport. At the airport, I had to crash two security lines, but I made my flight. I was the last to get on. Honestly, 20 seconds later and they would have stopped me from boarding. Thirty minutes into the flight and I was still clutching the hat. 

Had I really gotten it? I had trouble believing it. I was also feeling that something magical had happened. The events in the last few hours seemed like they had been orchestrated by some outside, playful force. What, I wondered, comes along with this hat when you buy it. Had I just witnessed a Suphist tweak, like the butt of a joke, to the last minute shenanigans that I knew so well in Turkey? 

 The events in my story are not the everyday kind, to be sure, but they suggest that, if necessary, this country could muster an awesome 11th hour finale to the EU deadline. What I want to say to Ahmet in the BBC interview is, "Don't discount your compatriots." For whatever it's worth, I give my personal guarantee that Turkey will not fail to become an EU member because it didn't get something done on time. Yes, of course, in the next ten years they will put many things off. Without doubt, they will work up a huge backlog of unmet conditions by adding to it at each stage of 10-year assimilation process. But then on the day of the deadline- no, make that evening of the last day- the prime minister will fly to Brussels and, because Belgium's clock is one hour earlier then Turkey's, finish all of it with seconds to spare.