advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Weekend I Stopped Mowing and Started Swimming. AI-Generated.
The house that was built for a family I no longer had For twenty-six years I lived in a four-bedroom house on a large stand in the older part of Pretoria, the kind of property estate agents call established, which is a polite word for a lot of garden and a roof that is always about to need something. We bought it when the children were small and it was the right house then, full of noise and bicycles and a trampoline that killed a patch of lawn that never recovered. It was a good house for a growing family, and we were a growing family, and for a long time that was simply what my life looked like.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Supplier We Forgot We Were Still Paying. AI-Generated.
The promotion nobody warned me about When they made me operations lead at the distribution company where I had worked for six years, I thought the hard part would be the warehouse. I knew the warehouse. I had come up through it, from a clerk checking manifests to the person who eventually ran the floor, and I understood pallets and routes and the particular chaos of a Friday afternoon dispatch better than I understood anything else in my life. So when the owners handed me the wider role, over in our offices in Pinetown, just outside Durban, I was quietly confident. I was wrong about where the danger was. The danger was not on the floor. It was in a cupboard.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The First Real Audience We Had Faced in Four Years. AI-Generated.
The brief that landed on my desk I run internal communications for a financial services company in Johannesburg, which for most of my career has meant newsletters, intranet posts, the occasional awkward town hall, and the quiet, unglamorous work of making a large organisation feel slightly less like a machine. It is a job you mostly notice only when it goes wrong. For four years, like everyone, we had done all of it on screens. Our big annual gathering, the one where the whole company comes together, had become a webinar, a grid of faces and a presenter talking into a camera in an empty room, and we had told ourselves it was fine because everyone was doing the same thing.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Bathroom We Left for Last for Eleven Years. AI-Generated.
The room we closed the door on We bought our house in Kloof, up in the hills above Durban, eleven years ago, and like most people we bought more house than we could afford to fix all at once. It was a solid old place, built in the seventies, with good bones and terrible taste, and we worked through it room by room over the years as money allowed. The kitchen first, because you live in a kitchen. Then the children's rooms, then the lounge, then eventually the garden and the stoep where we now spend most of our weekends. Every project was a small triumph, and every project taught us a little more about what we wanted the house to be.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Customers Who Could Not Get to Me to Pay. AI-Generated.
The shop my father built on trust My father opened a furniture and appliance shop in a small town in the North West province in the early nineteen eighties, and he built it, more than anything, on a book. A hardcover ledger with a cracked spine, in which he wrote the name of every person who bought a bed or a stove or a kitchen table on terms, and what they owed, and what they had paid, in his careful handwriting. People in our town did not have credit cards and many did not have bank accounts, and the shop worked because my father trusted them and they trusted him, and the book held the trust in the middle. I grew up doing my homework at the counter, watching farmers and domestic workers and teachers and pensioners come in and pay a little off their accounts, in cash, and watching my father make his small neat marks in the book.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Shed Full of Tractors Nobody Could Put a Price On. AI-Generated.
The shed my wife called my second marriage I farmed a stretch of maize and a few hundred head of cattle outside Reitz, in the eastern Free State, for most of my working life, and somewhere along the way I started collecting tractors. Not new ones. Old ones. The first was a grey Ferguson that my father bought in 1958, the year before I was born, and when he passed I could not bring myself to sell it, so it sat in the shed and I told myself I would restore it one day. Then a neighbour was clearing out an estate and there was a Fordson that needed a new head, and after that a John Deere that had been left out in a vlei for so long the birds had nested in the exhaust. My wife, Hannetjie, used to stand at the kitchen window with her coffee and watch me walk down to the shed in the early light, and she would say, with no real cruelty in it, that the shed was my second marriage.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Geyser Job I Could Not Start Without Buying the Parts First. AI-Generated.
The trade my father warned me away from I am a plumber in Boksburg, on the East Rand, and I have been one for nineteen years, which is long enough to know that the hardest pipe to unblock is the one between the work you have done and the money you are owed for it. My father was a plumber too, and he spent my whole childhood telling me not to go into it, not because the work is bad, the work is honest and I love it, but because of exactly the thing that nearly undid me last year. You do the job, you do it well, and then you wait. The invoice goes out and it sits, and the client is a good person who fully intends to pay you, just not this week, and meanwhile the whole machine of your little business runs on cash you do not have yet.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
I Burn in Twenty Minutes, and My Family Lives for the Shore. AI-Generated.
The genetics I did not ask for I have the kind of skin that comes with a warning label. Pale, freckled, the sort of red hair that was funny at school and expensive at the pharmacy. My mother used to dress me for the beach like I was being sent into a blizzard, long sleeves and a wide hat and a nose painted white with zinc, and I hated every second of it. I grew up believing, deep down, that the beach was simply not a place for people like me. Other children ran into the waves. I sat under a towel pinned between two deckchairs and watched the light move on the water and counted the minutes until we could go home.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Day the World Went Flat, and the Vial That Coaxed It Back. AI-Generated.
The morning I could not smell the coffee The day I realised I could not smell anything, I was standing over a mug of coffee in my own kitchen in Durban, watching the steam lift off it, and feeling nothing at all. I am a man in my forties. I have drunk coffee every morning of my adult life. I put my face right down into the cup the way you do when you want the first good lungful of it before the first sip, and there was nothing there. Not a weak version of the smell. Nothing. A clean, total blank, as if someone had switched off a sense while I slept and not bothered to tell me.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Fitter Who Taught Me to Listen to a Mill Before I Touched It. AI-Generated.
The man who hired my ears before my hands Old Cronje did not look at my hands when he interviewed me. He looked at my face while a hammer mill ran forty metres away behind a wall, and he asked me what I could hear. I was twenty-two and I said, a bit smartly, that I could hear a hammer mill. He said no, I could hear a hammer mill that was fine. He said the day I could hear one that was about to not be fine, he would let me work on it alone. It took three years before he said that to me, and by then he was the closest thing I had to a father in that place.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
