advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
Thirty Years of Wedding Bands Took the Top Off My Left Ear. AI-Generated.
Every Song You Have Ever Danced To at a Wedding If you got married in the Western Cape between 1994 and last year, there is a fair chance I played at your reception. Not famously. I was the keyboard player at the back, slightly to the left, behind the singer, in a band that changed its name four times but never its setlist. We did "Sweet Caroline". We did "Pretty Belinda". We did "Jerusalema" four hundred times in 2020 and 2021 until I could play it in my sleep, and sometimes did.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
I Spent Thirty Years Guiding Planes and Could Not Get a Dog Shelter Onto Page One. AI-Generated.
The Tower For thirty-one years I was an air traffic controller at the airport in what we now call Gqeberha. I retired in 2022 with a good pension, a bad back, and a habit I still cannot shake of looking up at every aircraft that passes overhead and working out its heading.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Kudu on the R40 and the Car I Could Not Look At. AI-Generated.
The Last Shot of the Night The wedding was at a lodge outside Hazyview, a long beautiful day in late May. The bride wore her grandmother's veil. The groom's father cried during the speeches and then pretended it was the smoke from the fire pit. I shot nineteen hundred frames, the last of them at about ten at night, a group of cousins dancing badly under fairy lights, and every one of them was laughing.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Orchids That Died Politely, One Leaf at a Time. AI-Generated.
Forty Years of Quiet Shelves I was a school librarian in Pretoria for thirty-four years. If you want to know what kind of person that makes you, it is the kind who likes things labelled, who reads the instructions before opening the box, and who believes most problems can be solved by looking them up properly. When I retired, my husband Gert and I sold our townhouse in Lynnwood and bought a small piece of land outside Hartbeespoort, with a view of the Magaliesberg, a borehole, a slightly tired cottage and a long tin shed that the estate agent called a workshop.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Kaptein the Tortoise Had Opinions About Balconies. AI-Generated.
The Lodger Who Came With the House When my wife Elsabe and I bought the house in Parkhurst in 1985, the previous owners left behind a cracked birdbath, a drawer full of mismatched keys and a leopard tortoise about the size of a side plate. The estate agent had not mentioned him. We found him on the second morning, chewing a dandelion by the back step with the calm of someone who had paid the bond himself.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Vet Retired, the Phone Went Quiet, and the Receptionist Got Handed the Internet
Twenty-Six Years Behind the Same Desk I have answered the phone at the same veterinary practice in Bloemfontein since 1999. I know which Labradors will eat anything, which cats need two people and a towel, and which farmers will pay on the day and which will pay in April when the cheque from the co-op comes in. I know the sound of a car pulling in too fast, which usually means a snake bite or a dog hit on the road, and I know to have the back door open before they reach it.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Six Hundred Ladders and the Bank Manager Who Liked Me but Said No. AI-Generated.
Aluminium and Patience My father made ladders. That is not a sentence many people can say, and I used to be embarrassed by it at school, when other children's fathers were teachers or policemen or worked at the mine. Mine worked in a corrugated iron workshop behind our house in Seshego, cutting aluminium and riveting rungs, and selling ladders to builders, painters and anyone else in Polokwane who needed to get onto a roof.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Dragon Boat Team Needed a Drummer, and I Ended Up Paddling. AI-Generated.
Fourteen Years of Custard I have been a dinner lady at a primary school in Sunderland for fourteen years. I serve about two hundred and forty lunches a day, I know which children will cry if their peas touch their potatoes, and I can carry a tray of jam sponge across a hall full of six-year-olds without losing a single portion. I am fifty-five, I have two grown sons, and until last spring the most strenuous thing I did outside work was walking our dog, Biscuit, up and down Roker seafront.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Forty Thousand Seed Packets and a Kitchen Scale That Lied. AI-Generated.
Beans in a Biscuit Tin My grandmother Nansi kept her runner bean seeds in a Peek Freans biscuit tin on top of the wardrobe. Purple and black, speckled like birds' eggs, saved every autumn from the best pods on the row behind her cottage near Llanidloes. She told me her mother had brought them from a farm in Cardiganshire, and that her mother's mother had grown them before that, and that nobody in the family had ever bought a runner bean seed in their lives.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Going Once, Going Twice, and the Tooth That Whistled on Every S. AI-Generated.
A Voice for Hire I sell other people's things for a living. Dining tables, tractors, deceased estates, a stuffed kudu head once, and on one memorable Saturday in Benoni, an entire bar counter from a pub that had closed after forty years. I have been an auctioneer for eleven years, and if you have ever stood at the back of a warehouse in Johannesburg on a Saturday morning holding a numbered paddle, there is a decent chance you have heard me.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Farmer Paid Me in Gold for a Sunday Callout in 1992. AI-Generated.
The Phone Call on a Sunday In March 1992 I was twenty-six and working for a tractor dealership outside Bethlehem in the Free State. I had my own bakkie, a toolbox I was still paying off, and a reputation, which I was quite proud of, as the young one who would come out on a weekend if you asked nicely.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Twenty-Two Years Asleep in a Truck Cab, and Then My Own Bed Felt Wrong. AI-Generated.
The last load My last load was frozen chicken out of Grand Island, bound for a distribution yard outside Denver. What I remember is backing into the bay at the end, setting the brakes, and sitting there with my hands on the wheel for a long time while a kid in a yellow vest waited for me to climb down. He finally knocked on the door. I told him I was just finishing a phone call. There was no phone call.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
