advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Grinding Noise I Ignored Because My Patients Could Not Wait. AI-Generated.
Mrs Venter's Gate Code Mrs Venter's gate code is the year she got married, 1961, and she told it to me on my very first visit as if she were handing me a house key. She was eighty-eight, she had a tumour the size of a plum in her pancreas, and she wanted to die at home in Waterkloof with her budgie on the windowsill and a view of the jacaranda she had planted as a bride. My job was to help her do that as gently as possible.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
I Photographed the Same Corner of Commissioner Street for Ten Years Before I Lived On It. AI-Generated.
The Corner I Kept Going Back To The first photograph I ever sold was of a man fixing a shoe on the corner of Commissioner and Rissik. He sat on an upturned paint tin with a last between his knees, and behind him the light came down the street in a long gold blade the way it only does in winter, when the sun is low enough to slip between the buildings. I took it on a Canon my uncle had given me with a cracked lens hood, and a magazine paid me eight hundred rand for it. I was twenty-four. I thought I was going to be famous by thirty.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
My Father Forgot His Own Face, but He Never Forgot His Collar. AI-Generated.
Eleven Shirts on the Bed The first time my father refused to get dressed, I found him sitting on the edge of his bed at half past nine in the morning with eleven shirts laid out around him like a hand of cards he could not decide how to play. He was still in his pyjama bottoms. He looked up at me and said, very politely, the way you might speak to a hotel receptionist, "I think someone has been in my cupboard."
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Server Lived in the Broom Cupboard Next to the Mop. AI-Generated.
A Box That Hummed Behind the Brooms When I joined the firm in 2011, the first thing Mr Steyn showed me after the kettle was the broom cupboard. Not because of the brooms. Because of the grey tower computer sitting on a plastic crate behind them, blinking a little green light, with a tangle of blue cables disappearing into a hole in the ceiling.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Twins Came to Live With Me, and So Did Their Toothache. AI-Generated.
Two Small Suitcases and One Big Question The twins arrived at my house in Pretoria East on a Sunday afternoon in February, each carrying a small blue suitcase and a plastic bag of toys. Their mother, my daughter Palesa, had taken a contract job on a cruise ship for eighteen months, the kind of money she could not say no to, and their father has not been part of the picture for a long time. So it was me. I was sixty-three, retired from twenty-eight years as a school secretary, and I had assumed my days of packing lunchboxes were finished.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Sixty-Eight, Asking for the Second Time, and My Granddaughter Holding the Laptop. AI-Generated.
The First Ring Cost Me Three Months of Overtime In 1979 I bought an engagement ring from a jeweller in Church Street, Pietermaritzburg, with money I had earned doing night shift at the railway workshops. It had a diamond so small that my late wife, Joyce, used to joke she needed her reading glasses to find it. She wore it for forty-one years. When she died in 2020 I gave it to our daughter, because it felt wrong for it to sit in a drawer.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Bride Was Getting Ready and My Car Was Dying on the N1. AI-Generated.
I Always Leave Two Hours Early There is one rule I have kept for every wedding in nine years of photographing them. I leave two hours before I need to. Not one hour. Two. Because the one thing a photographer can never do is be late for the bride getting ready, those quiet, nervous, beautiful hours in a room full of hairspray and mothers, which you can never recreate afterwards.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
I Dug Up My Mother's Fig Tree Because She Swore There Was Gold Under It. AI-Generated.
She Asked About the Tree Every Sunday My mother has lived in the same house in Kensington, Johannesburg, since 1971. My father planted a fig tree in the back corner of the garden the year they moved in, and for fifty years it has dropped purple fruit onto the lawn every February, attracting every mousebird and every wasp in the suburb.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
I Washed Thirty-One Cars to Buy My Mother a Birthday Present. AI-Generated.
Every Year It Was a Card From the Garage My mother turned forty-five on the fourteenth of September this year. For as long as I can remember, her birthday has gone like this. My little sister makes her a card at school with glitter that gets everywhere for a month. I go to the Engen on the corner the night before and buy a card with a flower on it and a slab of Bar-One, and I write "Happy birthday Ma, love Sipho" inside, and she says thank you and puts it on the fridge.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
I Piped Other People's Initials Onto Wedding Cakes While My Own Marriage Ended. AI-Generated.
Two Letters in Royal Icing The order was for a three tier naked cake with fresh roses and the initials T and L in gold on the top tier. I remember it exactly because I was piping the L when my husband walked into the kitchen, stood by the fridge, and said he thought we should stop pretending.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Cat Found the Warm Spot Before We Found the Leak. AI-Generated.
Dirk Moves to the Passage Our cat is called Dirk, after nobody in particular. He is fourteen, ginger, and so set in his ways that my wife says he has the personality of a retired magistrate. For most of his life he slept on the end of our bed in winter and under the lemon geranium on the stoep in summer. He did not change his arrangements for anything.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Machine Sent My Customers to a Groomer Who Retired Two Years Ago. AI-Generated.
The Poodle That Stopped Booking For eleven years I have washed dogs in the back of a white Toyota Quantum with the seats taken out. There is a steel tub where the middle row used to be, a hose that runs off a forty litre tank, a little geyser my late husband rigged to the battery, and a smell that never quite leaves my hair no matter how much coconut shampoo I use on myself at night. I drive from Durban North to Umhlanga to La Lucia and back, and I know which gate codes end in a hash and which ones end in a star.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
