advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
One Empty Seat, Three People: A Moral Dilemma With No Perfect Answer
Imagine you are driving alone on a freezing evening. The road is quiet, the temperature is dropping, and there are no other vehicles nearby. A bus has broken down, leaving three people stranded on the roadside.
By parwinder singh3 months ago in Journal
The Cold That Would Not Leave My Bones After I Was Well Again. AI-Generated.
The illness that overstayed its welcome I got sick in the middle of a Highveld winter, the kind of cold that settles into Johannesburg in July and makes you forget the year has any warm months in it at all. It started as a chest cold, the sort of thing I had shrugged off a hundred times before. I was fifty three and had always thought of myself as strong. I gardened. I walked. I carried my own shopping up the stairs without a second thought. So when the cough would not clear, I told myself it was nothing, and I kept going to work and kept ignoring the tightness that was building in my chest like a fist slowly closing.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
I Started at a Germiston Hospital on a Monday and Needed a Home by Friday. AI-Generated.
The phone call that changed everything I was standing in my mother's kitchen in Polokwane when the call came through. The woman on the other end told me the post was mine, a proper nursing position at a hospital in Germiston, and could I start on Monday. It was a Wednesday. I said yes before my brain had caught up with my mouth, and then I put the phone down and just stood there with my hand still on it, staring at the kettle.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
Opening My Own Practice, and the Small Thing That Made It Real. AI-Generated.
Leaving the Big Practice For eight years I worked at a large physiotherapy practice in Durban, the kind with four treatment rooms, a receptionist who knew every medical aid scheme by heart, and a hydrotherapy pool that always smelled faintly of chlorine. It was a good place. I learned a great deal there, and I am not going to pretend I left because of some dramatic falling out. I left because I was thirty four and I kept lying awake thinking about what it would feel like to have my own name on a door.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
A Customer Told Me a Chatbot Had Sent Him to My Roastery. AI-Generated.
The Morning He Walked In The roastery smells of roasting coffee by about seven in the morning, and by nine it has soaked into everything. My clothes, my hair, the little office chair with the torn seat, the invoices piled on the shelf. People who visit always say the same thing when they come through the door. They stop, they breathe in, and they say something like, oh, that is wonderful. I have stopped noticing it myself, honestly. You cannot smell your own house, and after twenty odd years around a drum roaster, this is my house.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Month the Store Accounts Finally Caught Up With Me. AI-Generated.
How It Started, Which Is To Say Slowly I manage a retail store here in South Africa, and I am in my forties, and for a long time I would have told you that I had my money under control. That was the lie I told myself, and I told it so calmly that I nearly believed it right up until the month everything landed on the same table at the same time.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Quiet Season Our Guesthouse Phone Simply Stopped Ringing. AI-Generated.
The place we built by hand My wife Elmarie and I have run a small guesthouse in the Drakensberg for the better part of twenty years. Seven rooms, a stone fireplace that smokes if you build the fire wrong, and a view of the escarpment that still stops me on the stoep some mornings the way it did the first week we moved in. We are not a resort. We do not have a spa or a conference centre. What we have is quiet, good coffee, a breakfast Elmarie refuses to shorten no matter how tired she is, and a stretch of mountain that people drive three hours from Johannesburg to sit and look at.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
Twelve-Hour Shifts and the Gym Bag I Kept Under the Ambulance Bench. AI-Generated.
The night I realised I was running on nothing There is a specific kind of tired that comes at four in the morning, somewhere between Tembisa and the hospital, when you have been on your feet for fifteen hours and the last thing you ate was half a rusk at the start of the shift. I remember standing at the back of the ambulance with a patient stabilised and the adrenaline draining out of me, and my hands were shaking so badly I could not get the pen to write straight on the paperwork. It was not fear. It was hunger, plain and stupid and completely avoidable, and I had let it happen to myself again.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Drought Broke Me Before It Broke, and So I Opened My Father's Ring Box. AI-Generated.
The dam was a bathtub of cracked mud I have farmed this stretch of the Free State for the better part of forty years, and I have never seen the veld go the colour it went this year. Not brown. Brown would have been a mercy. It went a kind of grey, the grey of old bone, and the grass that was left crunched under my boots like something already dead. By June the dam that my grandfather scraped out with a borrowed grader in the fifties was a bathtub of cracked mud, and the two boreholes that keep this place alive were coughing air more often than water.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
We Put a Little Wooden House at the Bottom of the Garden for Ma. AI-Generated.
The Phone Call That Started It The call came on a Tuesday, which is the day I do the least, so of course that was the day everything changed. My husband, Pieter, had been talking to his mother on the phone for forty minutes, and I could tell from the back of his neck that it was not going well. When he hung up he sat down at the kitchen table and said, very quietly, that Ma had fallen again. Not badly. She caught herself on the door frame. But she had not told us, and we only found out because the neighbour mentioned it in passing, and that is the sort of thing that ties a knot in your stomach for the whole afternoon.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
