advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Hour My Head Finally Went Quiet in Helsinki. AI-Generated.
I am forty-eight, and for most of this decade I measured my life in unread messages. I ran operations for a logistics company on the East Rand, which is a long way of saying I spent fourteen years being the person everyone phoned when something went wrong at a loading bay. My phone woke me at two in the morning. It woke me at four. I got so used to the buzzing that I started feeling phantom buzzes in an empty pocket, standing in a queue at Pick n Pay, my hand twitching toward nothing.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Year I Learned What My Husband Had Been Holding Together With His Bare Hands. AI-Generated.
When Danie died, I did not inherit a business. I inherited a set of keys I did not know the use of, a fireproof cabinet I could not open, and eleven years of a routine that lived entirely inside my late husband's head. The workshop sat on a side street in Boksburg, a long low building with two roller doors, a pit, and a yard out the back where the cars waited their turn under a tree that dropped leaves into every open bonnet. I had been there maybe a dozen times in all those years. I brought lunch sometimes. I signed things when the bank asked. I thought that was knowing the place. It was not.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Buyer Said Yes, Then Asked for a Symbol I Had Never Looked For. AI-Generated.
A phone call I had been chasing for two years I make jam and granola. That is the whole business, more or less, though on the days I feel important I call it a small-batch preserves and breakfast company. It started in the kitchen of my apartment in Rosemont, in Montreal, with a water bath canner my mother gave me and far too many crates of Quebec strawberries bought at Jean-Talon market in a fit of June optimism. For three years I sold at weekend markets and to two or three cafes who liked that my labels were handwritten. Then I rented a tiny commercial unit near Marche Centrale, barely bigger than a double garage, with a stainless table, a proper gas range, and a walk-in that hummed so loudly I named it.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Two Hours Between the Last Client and the First Drink. AI-Generated.
I kept other people's accounts for twenty-six years. Small firms mostly, a panel beater, two dentists, a man who imported garden furniture and never once filed on time. I was the person they trusted with the thing they found frightening. I reconciled their statements to the cent. I phoned them before SARS did. For a long time I believed that a man who could hold other people's money straight could not possibly be coming apart in his own hands. That belief cost me nearly everything I had.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
My Wife Named the Same Two Places for Thirty Years, So I Finally Booked Them Both. AI-Generated.
The list I was never supposed to have I am fifty eight, and I have spent my whole working life as the sort of man who reads the manual before he opens the box. I check the oil before a long drive even when the car is three weeks old. I write the shopping list in the order the aisles run at our Spar so I do not have to double back. My wife Lindiwe teases me about it, gently, the way you tease someone you have decided to keep. For thirty years of marriage she has let me be the one who worries so that she can be the one who laughs.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
My Father Started Praying Again at Eighty-One, and I Learned to Sit Still Long Enough to Eat With Him. AI-Generated.
The booking I almost cancelled twice My father turned eighty-one in the autumn, and somewhere in the two years before that he had become a different man at the dinner table. Not louder, not preachy, just careful in a way he never used to be. He started checking labels. He started saying the words over bread again, under his breath, the way his own father had, words I had watched him drop quietly somewhere around the time I was a teenager and he was busy being a man with a mortgage and no patience for ceremony.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The House Was Too Big for One Set of Keys. AI-Generated.
The last Christmas that filled every room For forty years I measured my life by how many people a house could hold. We bought the place in the suburbs north of Johannesburg when the children were small and the garden was the whole point. Four bedrooms, a stoep that caught the afternoon sun, a lawn that my husband Brian mowed every Saturday in the same pair of veldskoene until the soles wore through. We raised two girls there. We buried a dog under the lemon tree. We hosted Christmases where the table had to be extended twice and the little ones ate off their laps in the lounge.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Tangle in the Bottom Drawer, and the Winter I Finally Fixed the Roof. AI-Generated.
Two winters of buckets I have run a picture framing shop on the main road of our town for twenty six years. It is not a grand place. There is a long bench where I cut mounts, a wall of moulding samples that customers run their thumbs along without asking, and a back room that smells of sawdust and the particular dust that only old glass gives off. I am fifty four, my knees tell me so on cold mornings, and I know the exact sound this shop makes when it is empty, which is most Tuesdays.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Boat Was Heavier Than My Excuses. AI-Generated.
I was forty-four and I could not carry my own shopping It started with a bag of dog food. Twelve kilograms, the big one, and I had to put it down twice between the car and the gate, standing there in the dark with my hands burning and my breath going like I had run somewhere. I was forty-four. Nothing was wrong with me that a doctor could name. I was just soft in the way you get when you spend fifteen years sitting at a desk, driving, sitting at a table, and telling yourself you will start something in the new year. I had been telling myself that for a lot of new years.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
For Thirty Years I Read the World in Grey, and Then Someone Gave the Browns Back. AI-Generated.
The window that would not get clean For the last few years before I retired I kept cleaning the kitchen window. I would stand at the sink with a cloth and a bottle of vinegar water and work at the glass, and the garden on the other side stayed the same soft, dim yellow it had always been lately, like weak tea through muslin. My late husband used to tease me that I had the cleanest grubby window in Pretoria. I did not argue. I thought the problem was the glass, or the afternoon light, or my age, which I was quietly starting to resent.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
Why Business Deals Fall Apart After the Handshake
In 2025, the most common reason a signed business deal fell apart had nothing to do with financing or a buyer's change of heart. In its 2025 dead-deal report , the deal platform Axial examined 75 transactions that broke after a signed letter of intent and found that diligence findings outside the formal earnings review caused 25.3% of the failures, up from 19.1% in 2023. Bad earnings numbers came second, at 21.3%.
By Leury Pichardoabout a month ago in Journal
