advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Morning the Storeroom Fan Went Quiet. AI-Generated.
The sound I only noticed once it stopped There is a particular Monday in Durban that I will remember for the rest of my working life, and the strange thing is that it began with a silence rather than a crash. I run a small architecture practice off Florida Road, five of us in total, including me. We are a modest outfit. We design homes, a few small commercial jobs, the occasional school hall, and we do it in two converted rooms above a coffee shop where the smell of the morning roast comes up through the floorboards. For years there was a sound in the background of that office that none of us consciously heard anymore. It was the fan on our server, sitting in the storeroom behind a curtain of lever-arch files and a mop that nobody ever used.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Coffee Tin on the Top Shelf. AI-Generated.
The Tin Started as a Joke I am twenty-eight, I work the line at a restaurant in the city bowl, and until about eight months ago the most expensive thing I had ever bought was my knives. So you can imagine how I felt when I decided I wanted to marry Thandeka, my girlfriend of five years, and realised that somewhere in that decision there was going to have to be a ring.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Night Light We Agreed to Buy Twice. AI-Generated.
The conversation happened at the kitchen table, not the car park There was no slammed door. I think people expect that, when I tell them. They brace, the way you brace when someone starts a story with a car crash. But ours did not end with a shout or a thrown plate or a message found on a phone left face up. It ended at the kitchen table in our place in Linden, on a Tuesday, with the kettle still warm and a dishcloth over the tap, and Thandeka saying the thing we had both been circling for the better part of a year.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Pottery Studio Nobody Could Find, and the Year I Stopped Waiting to Be Discovered. AI-Generated.
I threw my first pot at thirty-four, in a weekend class I signed up for because my marriage was quietly ending and I needed somewhere to put my hands. Clay saved me, I am not being dramatic, it genuinely did. Four years later I had left my office job, converted a garage into a studio with a secondhand kiln and two wheels, and started teaching small classes and selling my own work. I believed, the way creative people often fatally believe, that if the work was good enough the world would simply find its way to my door.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Biggest Yes of My Life Arrived With a Hole in the Middle of It. AI-Generated.
I make signs. Not the pretty kind, the serious kind. Safety signage, reflective boards, the hard-wearing stuff that goes up on construction sites and in factories and down mine shafts and tells people where the fire exits are and which way the traffic flows and not to put their hands in the machine. It is not glamorous. Nobody admires a sign. But people get hurt when the signs are wrong or missing, so I have always taken it seriously, and over about nine years I built a small workshop in an industrial area with three employees and a reputation for not cutting corners.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Wreck in the Driveway That My Husband Called a Project. AI-Generated.
My husband, Werner, is a wonderful man with one serious flaw, which is that he cannot throw anything away if there is the faintest theoretical possibility it could one day be fixed. Our garage is a monument to this flaw. Three lawnmowers, two of which run. A television from a previous decade. A box of cables that connect to nothing we still own. I have made my peace with most of it, because a marriage is a long exercise in choosing which battles to fight.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Spice Blend My Grandmother Measured With Her Hand. AI-Generated.
My grandmother built a small spice business out of her kitchen over the course of about thirty years, and she did it with her hands. Literally with her hands. She never owned a scale she trusted. She measured her signature blend by the cup of her palm, a pinch of this, a scoop of that, and somehow it came out identical every single time, batch after batch, year after year. People drove across the city for her jars. She sold them at markets and to a few delis and, toward the end, by word of mouth to a loyal list of people who would not cook without her.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Peach Pip That Interrupted My Own Set. AI-Generated.
I have sung at more weddings than I can count. Three hundred, maybe four. For about twelve years now my weekends belong to other people's happiest days, and I have made my peace with the strange life of it, the loading in at four, the sound check nobody listens to, the first dance where I watch a couple sway and feel genuinely moved for strangers I will never see again. My face is part of the job. People are looking at me while they eat their starters. I smile for a living, really, as much as I sing for one.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Frame Shop My Grandfather Swore the Internet Would Never Touch. AI-Generated.
My grandfather opened the frame shop in 1971, in a narrow building between a tailor and a shoe repair that have both long since closed. He cut mitres by eye. He could look at a watercolour and tell you to the millimetre how much breathing room it wanted around the edge, and he was almost never wrong. I grew up in the back of that shop sweeping sawdust and getting glue on everything, and when he got too shaky to hold the blade I took it over without either of us ever quite saying that was what was happening.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Cushion My Mother-in-Law Would Not Let Anyone Plump. AI-Generated.
My mother-in-law, Beatrix, did not like me for the first fifteen years I knew her, and I think I only earned her approval by outlasting her doubt. She was a hard, funny, suspicious woman who had survived a great deal and trusted almost nothing, least of all banks, least of all men who married her only daughter. When she died last winter at eighty-eight, it fell to me, of all people, to clear out her house, because my wife could not bear to and Beatrix's other relatives had scattered to other countries years before.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Batch That Tasted Like a Swimming Pool, and Why I Stopped Blaming Myself. AI-Generated.
I make gin. Small batches, in a converted outbuilding behind our house on a smallholding outside the city, with a little copper still my partner and I saved for over two years. It started as a hobby that got out of hand in the best way. People liked it. A couple of local restaurants took bottles. For about eighteen months everything I made came out tasting the way I meant it to, bright and clean with a long juniper finish and a bit of fynbos I forage myself, and I walked around feeling quietly, insufferably proud of my own palate.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Fourteen Stairs I Stopped Being Able to Climb. AI-Generated.
I taught Grade 6 for thirty-one years in a school on the East Rand, and for most of my marriage I believed a person was only as settled as the size of the home they kept. We bought a face-brick house in Fourways in 1989, four bedrooms, a long sloping garden, a double garage that my husband filled with tools he used maybe twice a year. We raised two children in it. I planted a jacaranda near the gate the week my daughter was born, and I used to stand at the kitchen window and watch it drop its purple mess all over the paving every October and feel something close to pride.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
