advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Night I Climbed a Ladder to Bed in the Middle of the Karoo. AI-Generated.
Starting over at the wrong age for it I was fifty-one when my marriage ended, which everyone agrees is the wrong age to start over, though nobody can tell you the right one. For thirty years I had been half of something, and when that half fell away I discovered I did not actually know how to be alone, not the deep kind of alone where there is no one in the next room to call out to. The house was too quiet. My friends were kind but had their own lives. My grown son lived in another province and phoned on Sundays.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Factory Closed on a Friday, and the Forms Beat Me for Months. AI-Generated.
Twenty-two years and a padlock I ran a machine on the same factory floor in Germiston for twenty-two years. Plastics, mostly, the kind of injection moulding that turns little pellets into the things you hold every day without thinking about them. I was there so long I could tell by the sound of a machine, from across the floor, which one was about to give trouble. The young fitters used to call me to listen. I was proud of that. A man likes to be the one they call.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Crash Was Minor. The Fog It Left Behind Was Not.. AI-Generated.
A stupid little fall The accident that changed my year was almost comically minor. I was riding my bike on a quiet road near our house outside Portland, early on a Sunday, going slowly, and a dog came out of nowhere and I grabbed too much front brake and went over the bars at maybe fifteen miles an hour. I landed, got up, swore at the dog, which had already lost interest, and rode home with a scraped elbow and a dented helmet, feeling like an idiot.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
Twenty-Two Boys, a Borrowed Trophy, and Nothing to Feed Them. AI-Generated.
The team nobody else would take I did not set out to coach soccer. I set out, three years ago, to get my own son to stop moping around the house on Saturdays, and the under-11 team at our local club in Benoni needed a coach or they were going to fold. Nobody else put up their hand. So I put up mine, a man who had played a bit of social football twenty years and twenty kilograms ago, and suddenly I was responsible for twenty-two boys who ran in all directions like startled chickens and listened to roughly none of what I said.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Lounge Suite We Paid For Three Times Over. AI-Generated.
A home that looked paid for When Thandeka and I got our first proper place, a small rented house in Boksburg with a wild little garden, we wanted it to look like we had arrived. We were both working, both young, both the first in our families to have jobs with payslips and provident funds, and there was a feeling, which I only understand now, that we had to prove something. To whom, I could not tell you. Ourselves, probably. Our parents, who had worked so hard so that we could stand where we stood.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
We Swapped a Gauteng Townhouse for a View of Paarl Mountain. AI-Generated.
The commute that ate our marriage My husband Dewald and I are both teachers. For eleven years we lived in a townhouse complex on the East Rand, one of those developments where every unit is the colour of weak coffee and the walls between you and the neighbours are more of a suggestion than a fact. We did not hate it. It was fine. Fine is a dangerous word, I have learned, because you can live inside fine for a decade and only notice afterwards that fine was quietly costing you everything.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
I Opened a Small Strength Studio With Other People's Barbells. AI-Generated.
The cubicle years For fourteen years I was an accountant in a mid-sized firm outside Columbus, Ohio, and for fourteen years I lifted weights in my garage before dawn because it was the only hour that belonged to me. I was good at my job and I did not love it. I was good at lifting and I loved it the way you love the one thing that keeps you sane. Barbell in the cold garage, breath steaming, the house asleep. That hour was the thing that made the other twenty-three bearable.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Decision I Made Alone, and the Kindness I Did Not Expect. AI-Generated.
The part nobody tells you I was twenty-eight when I found myself sitting on the edge of my bath at two in the morning, holding a test I had taken three times because I did not believe it the first two. I am writing this now, years later, calm and settled and glad of my life, because when I was going through it I searched and searched for someone who had just said it plainly, without a sermon attached, and I could not find her. So I am going to be her, for whoever needs it.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Morning My Pigeons Got a Better House Than the Dog. AI-Generated.
A man needs a shed, my father used to say I worked on the railways for thirty-one years, mostly around Germiston, in the yards where the wind comes through in winter like it has a personal grudge. When I retired, my wife Elsie was quietly worried, and she was right to be. A man who has woken at half past four every morning of his adult life does not suddenly learn to sleep in. I was up at dawn with nothing to do, rearranging the tools in the garage so many times that she started hiding the good screwdriver just to give me a reason to look for it.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
Nineteen Years of Hotel Keys, and the One I Kept. AI-Generated.
The job that never let me land For nineteen years I handed out drinks at thirty-eight thousand feet and slept in rooms that were not mine. Cabin crew, long haul, mostly the Johannesburg to London and Johannesburg to the Gulf runs, with a few seasons flying out of the Middle East when the money there was better. People hear it and picture glamour. What it actually is, is a trolley bag that never fully unpacks, a toilet bag that lives in a ziplock, and a habit of putting your passport in the exact same pocket every single time so that your hands can find it when your brain is somewhere over the Sahara and three time zones behind your watch.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The City I Had Only Ever Driven Through on the Way to Somewhere Else. AI-Generated.
The job I nearly said no to I was managing a clothing store in a small town for most of my thirties, a steady job in a quiet place, raising my daughter on my own after her father and I went our separate ways when she was four. It was a good enough life, if a small one, and I had more or less stopped expecting it to get bigger. So when the company offered me a regional management role, a real step up, more money, more responsibility, a chance to finally get ahead, I should have been thrilled. Instead I felt something close to panic, because the role was based in Johannesburg, and Johannesburg was the one place in the country I had been raised, my whole life, to be afraid of.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Half-Collapsed Barn I Could Not Bring Myself to Touch. AI-Generated.
The place my grandfather built with his hands When my grandfather died he left me the old farmstead at the end of a long dirt road, a place I had spent every childhood summer at and had not set foot on in nearly fifteen years. The house itself was tired but sound. The land was overgrown but it was good land. And at the far edge of the yard stood the barn, the great timber-and-stone barn that my grandfather had built mostly by his own hands as a young man, and that had been, for my whole childhood, the beating heart of the whole place.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
