advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
Piet Wanted to Retire, and Suddenly We Had to Put a Price on Twelve Years. AI-Generated.
The morning he told me We had been proofing dough side by side for twelve years when Piet said it, and he said it the way you say something you have rehearsed in the car. It was a Tuesday, quarter past four, the ovens still cold, and he had flour on his forearms already because he never waited for me to start. He said, Andries, I think this is my last winter here.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
At Forty-One I Chose the Ring Myself, and Chose It Grown in a Lab. AI-Generated.
The Woman Who Had Done This Before I married for the first time at twenty-four, and I did it the way you are supposed to. A man got down on one knee with a ring he had chosen alone, a ring I had no part in picking, a ring I wore for eleven years and then quietly took off in a lawyer's office. I do not tell that story for sympathy. The marriage ended without villains, just two people who had grown in different directions. But I mention the ring because it matters to what came later. That first ring had been a surprise, a gesture, a thing that happened to me. I loved it at the time. I also never once felt like it was mine, because I had never been asked.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
The Enquiries Started Coming From a Voice in a Phone, Not the Yellow Pages. AI-Generated.
The Shop That Time Was Supposed to Forget I fix typewriters. I have done it in the same narrow shop off a side street in Pretoria for the better part of forty years, first with my father and then, after he passed, on my own. Olivetti, Olympia, the old Remingtons, the Hermes Baby that people bring in wrapped in a jersey like it is a sick child. I clean the type slugs with a brush and paraffin, I re-ink ribbons, I chase down platen rollers that stopped being made before I was born. For most of my life this was a dying trade, and I made my peace with dying trades a long time ago.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
My Sister and I Could Not Agree What Our Parents' House Was Worth. AI-Generated.
The House With Both Our Childhoods In It When our mother died, eighteen months after our father, my sister Anke and I were left with the house on the hill in Bloemfontein where we had both grown up. Three bedrooms, a stoep that caught the afternoon sun, a lemon tree our father had planted the year I was born, and a kitchen that still, somehow, smelled faintly of every Sunday lunch of my childhood. We were the only two children. There was no will fight, no drama, no long lost cousin. Just the two of us, and one house, and the enormous, unspoken question of what came next.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
The Water Cooler Became the Busiest Corner of My Barbershop. AI-Generated.
The Garage I Turned Into a Chair I opened my barbershop in a converted garage in Durban with almost nothing. Two secondhand chairs, a mirror I bought off a man who was closing his salon in Overport, and a floor I tiled myself over three weekends while my cousin held the spirit level and gave opinions nobody asked for. My whole business plan fit on the back of a flyer. Cut hair well, charge fair, do not keep people waiting longer than you have to. That was it.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
I Put a Wooden Cabin at the End of the Garden and Finally Had a Workshop. AI-Generated.
The Problem of a Man With Nowhere to Go I retired at sixty-two after thirty-eight years as a fitter and turner, and within about six weeks my wife Marina and I had a problem neither of us would say out loud. I was always there. Not in a bad way. In a completely unbearable way. I had spent nearly four decades leaving the house at six and coming home at five, and suddenly I was underfoot from dawn to dusk, reorganising her kitchen cupboards, offering opinions on the washing, following her from room to room like a large retired dog.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
I Ran a Kayak Rental by a Lake and Taught Myself Marketing From a Screen. AI-Generated.
The Business That Only Worked When People Knew It Existed I run a small kayak and canoe rental down by the lake. Twelve boats, a battered trailer, a wooden hut with a till and a kettle, and a stretch of shoreline where the water goes glassy in the early morning and people fall a little bit in love with the place whether they meant to or not. In summer I am run off my feet. In the shoulder seasons I live or die entirely on whether anyone actually knows I am there.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
The Flat in Sandringham Where I Learned to Cook for One. AI-Generated.
The Morning the House Was Not Mine Anymore I moved out on a Tuesday because Tuesdays felt like nobody was watching. Erin took the couch, the good knives, and the dog, which was fair, because the dog had always been hers first and had only ever tolerated me. I took my clothes, a box of books, the kettle, and a strange, floating feeling that I had misplaced my own life somewhere between the lounge and the front gate. We had not shouted. That was the worst part. Seven years just quietly ran out of road, and one of us had to be the one to say it out loud.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
My Knees Retired Before I Did, So I Built Some Heat Into the House. AI-Generated.
The Body That Stopped Doing What I Asked For twenty years I was a runner. Not a fast one, not a competitive one, just a man who laced up before dawn and put in the kilometres because the world made more sense to me afterward. Cape Town gave me a lifetime of routes, the promenade at Sea Point when the wind allowed, the trails up on the mountain when it did not. Running was not exercise for me. It was how I thought, how I grieved when my father died, how I stayed married through two hard years I do not talk about much. My legs carried a lot more than my weight.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
Our First Place Together Was a Small Flat in Germiston. AI-Generated.
Two Kids Pretending to Be Adults We got married younger than most of our friends thought was sensible, Lerato and I, and we did it on almost nothing. The wedding was small, the honeymoon was two nights up the road, and the day after we came back we sat on her mother's spare bed, where we had been staying, and admitted to each other that we had no idea how to actually be married adults with our own front door. We both had jobs, brand new ones, mine at a logistics company and hers as a junior in an accounting firm, and between our two starting salaries we had exactly enough courage to try and exactly enough fear to make it interesting.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
My Camera Bag Lives in the Boot and My Phone Runs the Whole Day. AI-Generated.
The boot is my office People imagine my job as the ten minutes where I lift a camera and a bride laughs at something her father says. That part is real, and I love it, but it is maybe two percent of the week. The rest is driving. My camera bag lives in the boot of my car, wedged against a cooler box and a folding reflector that has never once folded the way the instructions promised, and I spend more hours behind a steering wheel than behind a lens. I shoot weddings and portraits, mostly around KwaZulu-Natal, sometimes up into the Free State when a couple has a farm in the family, and I go where the work is because a solo business cannot afford to be picky about postcodes.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
My Son Got Into University Four Hundred Kilometres Away. AI-Generated.
The letter that changed the kitchen The morning the acceptance came, I was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon in my hand, stirring pap for breakfast, and my son Tebogo came running down the passage in his socks, sliding the last two metres the way he used to when he was seven. He pushed the phone into my face so close I could not read a single word. I had to take it from him and hold it at arm's length, and even then my eyes were doing something strange, the letters swimming, because I already knew from his face what it said. He was in. First in our whole family. First cousin, first nephew, first grandchild, the first Maleka to be offered a place at a real university in a real city, and that city was four hundred kilometres away from our kitchen in Polokwane.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
