advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
Sixty Years Behind the Same Counter in Kokstad, and My Daughter Holding a Phone at It. AI-Generated.
The Counter Has a Dip in It There is a shallow dip worn into the wooden counter of my pharmacy in Kokstad, just left of the till. My grandfather made it first, resting his forearm there while he wrote out labels by hand in the 1960s. My father deepened it through the eighties and nineties. Now it fits my arm exactly, and when I lean on it at the end of a day I sometimes feel like I am leaning on both of them.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
Nomvula Failed the Alley Dock Twice, and I Kept Teaching Her Anyway. AI-Generated.
The White Corolla on Sutherland Street I have taught people to drive in Mthatha for nineteen years. My car is a white Toyota Corolla with dual controls, a dent in the back left door from a learner who confused reverse with first in 2014, and a sticker on the dashboard that says "Breathe" in my granddaughter's handwriting. I park it most mornings on Sutherland Street near the taxi rank, and people find me there. That is how it has always worked.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Upright in My Mother's Front Room Was Always a Quarter Tone Flat. AI-Generated.
The Call Came Between Two Pianos I was kneeling under a Yamaha in the school hall at Cambridge when my sister phoned. I tune pianos for a living, and have done for thirty-one years, so I know the feeling of a wrench in my hand and my ear pressed close to a string. I know the sound a note makes just before it settles. I did not know the sound my sister would make when she said Ma had gone in the night.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
I Drew Two Hundred Front Doors Before I Owned One. AI-Generated.
The Lines Were Always for Other People The first front door I ever drew professionally belonged to a dentist in Waterkloof who wanted it wider. Not taller, not grander, just wider, because his wife had once struggled to get a pram through their old one and he never forgot the sound she made. I was twenty-three, fresh out of my degree at Tuks, and I spent two full days on that door. I measured prams. I measured wheelchairs. I measured the dentist's golden retriever, which did not enjoy the experience.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Guard Who Kept Standing at the Gate Without Being Paid. AI-Generated.
The Phone Call at Ten Past Two Sipho Mbeki phoned me at ten past two on a Thursday morning in July. I knew the time because the wind off Algoa Bay had been rattling the bedroom window for an hour and I was already awake, staring at the ceiling and doing sums in my head the way I always do when the weather turns.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Church Kombi Coughed Once on the Hill and Then Said Nothing. AI-Generated.
The Hill Outside Bethlehem It happened on the rise just past the grain silos, on the road back from a funeral in Clarens. I had eleven people in the Kombi. Six of them were over seventy, three were girls from the youth choir still in their white blouses, and one was Oom Gerrit, who sat in the front seat because he always sat in the front seat and nobody in nineteen years had found the courage to suggest otherwise.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Mud Line on the Wall Was Exactly Knee High. AI-Generated.
The Night the Stream Changed Its Mind For thirty one years there was a little stream at the bottom of our road in Umkomaas that I could step over in my school shoes. My late husband Desmond used to call it "the dribble". He would say it every time we walked past, as if it were a joke he had just thought of, and I would roll my eyes every time, as if I had not heard it before.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
My Mother Walks to a Bus Stop That Closed in 1974. AI-Generated.
Three in the Morning, Coat On The first time I found my mother at the back door at three in the morning, she had her good wool coat on over her nightgown and her purse hooked over her arm. The thermometer outside the kitchen window read minus eleven. She looked at me with complete calm and said, "I'll miss the number 16 if you keep me talking, Danny."
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Pallet Nails That Kept Turning Up in Other People's Gardens. AI-Generated.
How We Ended Up Chipping Pallets My partner Dale and I did not set out to make mulch. We set out to stop paying for it. We had four acres outside Gympie, a vegetable patch that drank water like a teenager drinks milk, and a neighbour who ran a freight depot and kept asking if anyone wanted his broken pallets. Dale borrowed a chipper from his cousin one long weekend in 2019, fed about forty pallets through it, and by Monday we had a mountain of pale, sweet smelling chip and a garden that held its moisture through a February that would have cooked it the year before.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
The Letters on Mr Patel's Shopfront Started Bending. AI-Generated.
A Trade That Lives in the Wrist I have painted signs in Fordsburg and Mayfair since 1990. Not printed them, not cut them out of vinyl on a machine, painted them. One-stroke lettering with a sable brush, a mahl stick resting against the glass, and a tin of enamel that smells like my father's garage. My father taught me on the back of old hardboard sheets, and he used to say a sign-writer's whole career lives in the wrist and the eye, and the wrist is the easy part.
By Josh Maraney4 days ago in Journal
