advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Drawer of Contracts Nobody Had Read Since 2016. AI-Generated.
The drawer I inherited When I became the operations manager of a small architecture practice in Cape Town, I inherited a beautiful office, eleven talented and slightly chaotic people, a coffee machine that was worshipped like a minor god, and a drawer. The drawer lived in a grey steel filing cabinet in the corner of the admin room, and it was where every contract the practice had ever signed went to be forgotten. Leases, supplier agreements, our professional indemnity insurance, software licences, the cleaning contract, the agreement with the printer people, the maintenance deal on the plotters. All of it, folded into that drawer, some of it dating back to 2016, none of it looked at since the day it was signed.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Round Brass Knob That Beat Me One Winter Morning. AI-Generated.
The door that would not open for me There is a particular kind of shame that arrives quietly. Mine arrived on a cold July morning in Bloemfontein, standing in my own passage in my pyjamas, unable to open my own bathroom door. The knob was a round brass one, original to the house, the kind my late wife Sannie chose in the eighties because they matched the light fittings. For forty years my hand closed around that knob without a thought. That morning my fingers simply would not grip and turn at the same time. The arthritis had been creeping up on me for a few years, but that was the first day it locked me out of a room in my own home.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Grandfather Who Was Sure the Bush Was Not For Him. AI-Generated.
My very good excuse I had a very good excuse for never going to the bush, and I had used it for forty years. I keep kosher. Properly, carefully, the way my mother kept it and her mother before her. In the city this is simply my life, unremarkable, woven into every ordinary day. But the bush, the lodges, the game reserves that everyone around me seemed to adore, those I had quietly filed under things that are not for me. How could they be? A camp in the middle of nowhere, a communal kitchen, meat of who knows what and prepared who knows how. It was easier, and I told myself more honest, to simply stay home.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
We Found Out We Were Having a Baby in a Cottage With Damp. AI-Generated.
Two lines and a patch of black mould We found out we were having a baby on a Tuesday evening, in the bathroom of a rented garden cottage, and the first thing I saw when my wife Refilwe held up the test with both lines showing and started to cry the good kind of tears was the patch of black mould creeping up the wall behind her head. That is the honest image I carry from the best moment of my life. Joy in the foreground, damp in the background, and me standing in the doorway feeling two enormous things at once.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Lettuces That Told Me What the Road Was Doing. AI-Generated.
Green that was not quite green I grow vegetables for a living. Not a farm, nothing grand, just under two hectares of beds where I raise salad leaves, herbs, spring onions and whatever else the restaurants in the valley will take from me each week. I took it over from an old couple who were retiring, and for the first few seasons it was the happiest work I have ever done. I would walk the rows first thing with my coffee and the leaves would be so green in the early light that it almost hurt to look at them.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Phone in the Fruit Bowl, and the Brother I Drove North. AI-Generated.
The keys in the fruit bowl For about two years my younger brother Daniël kept his car keys in a fruit bowl on my kitchen counter, because for about two years I did not trust him to drive. He lived twenty minutes away but he stayed at my house more nights than not, on the couch, because I was frightened of what a quiet flat and a full bottle would do to him without anyone watching. That fruit bowl held his keys, some old batteries, a few coins, and the entire weight of a situation I did not know how to carry.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Golf That Sat Under a Tree For Three Years. AI-Generated.
The first thing I ever owned outright I bought that Golf with my own money when I was twenty four. A silver Mk4, a bit tired already, a hundred and ninety thousand on the clock, bought off a guy in Boksburg who clearly loved it more than his own children and made me promise to look after it. I did look after it. I washed it on Sundays in my mother's driveway in Benoni, I saved for proper tyres instead of the cheap ones, I knew the sound of every part of it. It was the first thing in my life that was fully mine, not financed, not shared, not borrowed. My name, my keys, my car.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Ringtone I Set to Silent, and the Debt I Could Not. AI-Generated.
The drawer where I kept my phone For most of a year and a half, I kept my personal phone in the second drawer of my kitchen units, on silent, face down, under a tea towel. I told my sister it was because I did not want to be distracted in the evenings. That was a lie I had almost come to believe myself. The truth was that the phone rang all day with numbers I did not recognise, and every one of them was someone I owed money to, and I had discovered that I could not feel the specific dread those calls caused if I simply could not hear or see the phone. So into the drawer it went, under the tea towel, and I got very good at pretending it was not there.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Wedding Weekend We Nearly Ran Out of Sheets. AI-Generated.
The job I thought I understood When I took over as manager of a small lodge in the Drakensberg, I thought I knew what the job was. Guests, bookings, the restaurant, keeping the staff happy, keeping the roof from leaking, smiling at people at breakfast when I had been awake since four with a generator problem. I came from a front of house background. I could run a floor, I could handle a difficult guest, I could talk a wedding party down off a ledge. What I could not do, it turned out, was the single least glamorous thing in the whole operation, and it very nearly ruined me in my third month.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Year the Muesli Outgrew Our Hands. AI-Generated.
A recipe that was never meant to leave the kitchen My mother made a toasted oat mix every winter for as long as I can remember. Oats, sunflower seeds, a little honey, whatever nuts were cheap that month, and a handful of dried pears she cut herself with a paring knife that had lost most of its handle. She kept it in an old sweet tin on top of the fridge, and if you were sick or sad or just passing through the kitchen at the wrong moment, she would tip some into a bowl and stand there until you ate it.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
