advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Haul Road I Could Not See the End Of. AI-Generated.
People ask me what it is like to drive a haul truck and they always imagine the size first. The tyres taller than a man, the tray you could park two bakkies in, the ladder you climb to reach a cab that sits where a second storey would be. They are right that the size is the first thing. What they never guess is the second thing, which is the dust. For most of my working life the dust was the real story of the job, and nobody outside the mine ever heard it.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Shoebox Under the Counter Finally Beat Me on a Rainy Tuesday. AI-Generated.
My father opened the shop in 1991, on a corner in Boksburg where the taxis turn and the traffic light has been broken for as long as anyone can remember. He sold car parts. Fan belts, wiper blades, brake pads, the little rubber grommets that nobody knows the name of until theirs perishes and the door starts to rattle. When he died the shop came to me, along with his way of doing things, which was to write everything on a piece of paper and put the piece of paper in a shoebox.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
I Translate Other People's Words All Day and Could Not Quiet My Own at Night. AI-Generated.
The Ceiling I Knew Better Than My Own Face There is a hairline crack in my bedroom ceiling that runs from the light fitting toward the window, and then stops, as if it changed its mind. I know it the way some people know a poem. I have looked at it at two in the morning more times than I can count, and at three, and at the pale grey hour when the first delivery vans start up in the street below and I finally understand that the night has beaten me again.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Smell of Hot Cotton at Half Past Five. AI-Generated.
Before the mountain is even awake People think the day at a lodge starts when the first guest asks for coffee. It does not. It starts in a small block building behind the kitchen, with a tin roof and two industrial machines and a window that looks straight at the back of the Drakensberg. I am there by half past five most mornings, and in winter it is dark and the grass is white with frost and my breath hangs in front of me until I switch the geyser on and the room begins to warm.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
Everything in the House Smelled of Smoke, Even the Gold I Never Wore. AI-Generated.
The morning the kitchen went up I am sixty-two, and until this year I thought I knew exactly how my house smelled. Toast in the mornings, the geranium on the windowsill, the slightly damp corner by the back door that no amount of paint ever fixed. Then one Tuesday a pot of oil on the stove decided it had waited long enough, and in the time it took me to answer the front door to a delivery, the kitchen caught.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Corporate Order That Was Too Big for My Little Boksburg Kitchen. AI-Generated.
The call that changed my week I have cooked out of the same kitchen in Boksburg for eleven years. It is not a big kitchen. There is one oven that runs slightly hot on the left, a four plate stove, and a second hand chest freezer my husband found in Benoni that hums like a tractor. My business grew out of Sunday lunches and funerals and the odd fortieth birthday, nothing grand. People in the neighbourhood know my name, they know my mutton curry, and they know I will not let a plate leave looking sad.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Promise I Finally Kept at the Edge of the Indian Ocean. AI-Generated.
The trip she never stopped mentioning For the better part of thirty years my wife, Marietjie, would mention Mozambique the way other people mention the weather. It came up at braais, at funerals, in the car when the radio went quiet. She had a cousin who went up in the eighties and came back talking about water the colour of a swimming pool and prawns the size of her hand, and somewhere in that story a seed went in and never stopped growing. I always said yes, one day. One day when the children were finished with school. One day when the bakkie was paid off. One day when work was quieter, which it never was, because I ran a small panelbeating shop in Boksburg and work is never quiet when you are the one who answers the phone.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Offer Came in on a Tuesday, and I Did Not Answer It for Eleven Weeks. AI-Generated.
A Stranger With a Clean Car The shop sits on the corner of Church Street and the lane that nobody has bothered to name since the drought of my childhood. It is a low building with a tin verandah, and in summer the verandah ticks all afternoon as the iron swells. My uncle Kobus left it to me when he died, the building and the business both, and I have run it now for the better part of twenty two years. Hardware on the left, feed on the right, and a counter in the middle where I have watched three generations of this town learn how to patch a fence.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Small Amounts That Went Missing Before the Cheque Reached Me. AI-Generated.
The Shoebox on the Kitchen Table For forty-one years I taught small children to find middle C. I retired from the primary school here in Ontario a while back now, and for most of my marriage I left anything to do with money to Harold. That was not pride on his part or laziness on mine. It was simply how we divided the house. I knew where every recorder and every triangle lived. He knew where the paperwork lived, and the paperwork lived in a grey filing cabinet in the spare room that I rarely opened.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Flat That Was Only Mine, Above the Lake Lights. AI-Generated.
The Day I Carried My Own Kettle Up Two Flights I am fifty-three. For twenty-six years I lived in a house in Primrose with a garden that needed me every weekend and a wife who stopped needing me somewhere along the way. We did not shout much at the end. That was almost the worst of it. We just moved around each other like two people sharing a corridor, polite and tired, until one evening in autumn we said the quiet thing out loud and could not unsay it.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
I Spent Eleven Years Inland Before a Physiotherapy Job Handed Me the Sea. AI-Generated.
The Phone Call That Moved Me Ninety Kilometres I am a physiotherapist, and for eleven years I worked in Pietermaritzburg, which is a city that keeps its weather to itself. The mist comes down in winter and sits on the hills like a wet blanket, and in summer the heat has nowhere to go, so it just presses. I was good at my job and I liked my patients, mostly older people with knees that had given up and young rugby players who thought they were immortal until a tackle told them otherwise. I had a flat near the hospital, a kettle that whistled too long, and a routine I could have done asleep.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Tide Table I Kept Long After the Boats Were Gone. AI-Generated.
The harbour still wakes me before the alarm does I am sixty-eight, and my body has kept the habit of the sea even though the sea has quietly let me go. I wake at twenty to five most mornings, before the light, the way I did for close to forty years. For a long time that meant pulling on a fleece in the dark, driving down to the small craft basin at Durban harbour, and standing on the wooden walkway with a mug of coffee while the diesel warmed and the gulls complained about nothing.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
