For forty-one years Mr Aydın recorded the arrival time of every bus that stopped outside his window. He was not employed to do this. He had no predilection for transport, no grievance against the municipality, and no theory he was trying to prove. He began in 1983 because a bus was late and he was annoyed, and he continued because stopping would have made the earlier entries pointless. This is, on inspection, the reason most long projects continue. The notebooks are unremarkable to look at. Each page carries a date, a column of times, and occasionally a laconic marginal note: *rain*, *driver new*, *football*. There is no commentary, no attempt at analysis, nothing that could be called a conclusion. He was not building an argument. He was simply refusing to let the observation go unrecorded, which is a different impulse and, arguably, a rarer one. When a transport researcher finally examined the archive, she found something the city's own data could not have shown her. Official records begin in 2006 and are, in any case, aggregated by month. Mr Aydın's pages are minute by minute, unbroken, and cover the two decades in which the route was altered eleven times. The effect of each alteration is legible in the figures, including three that the municipality's own files describe as having no measurable impact. The researcher was careful about what this proved. One man at one window is not a survey. His attention was uneven; he was ill for six weeks in 1997 and the gap is obvious. But the archive is not valuable because it is rigorous. It is valuable because it is continuous, and continuity is the one property that cannot be reconstructed after the fact. No amount of funding buys back an unobserved decade. Mr Aydın himself was mildly embarrassed by the interest. He described the project, when pressed, as a habit rather than an achievement, and seemed genuinely puzzled that anyone would want the notebooks. He offered them without conditions and declined to be photographed with them. There is a temptation to make this into a parable about persistence, and he would have found that fatuous. The more interesting reading is about institutions. The city had every resource he lacked: staff, budget, statutory authority, and a direct interest in the answer. What it did not have was a person willing to write down a number every day for four decades without being asked, and no organisational structure yet devised reliably produces one. The notebooks are now held in the municipal archive, catalogued and, as far as anyone can tell, unread since the researcher finished with them. Mr Aydın moved to a flat on the other side of the city in 2024. The window there does not face a bus stop. He has not started anything new.