advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Winter I Taught My Hands to Hold On Again in the Peak District. AI-Generated.
The wake-up I turned 41 on a Tuesday, and by the Thursday I was sitting in a chemist car park in Sheffield with a fractured wrist in a cast and a packet of cigarettes I could no longer open one-handed. That felt like a joke the universe had set up months in advance. The wrist was nothing heroic. I slipped on wet decking carrying a laptop bag, put my hand out the way you are told never to do, and heard a sound I still do not like remembering.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Paperwork I Could Not Do at Three in the Morning. AI-Generated.
She arrived and the world got small My daughter was born in the middle of a Cape Town winter, the kind where the rain comes sideways off the mountain and the flat never quite feels warm. I had planned so much. I had a hospital bag packed six weeks early. I had a spreadsheet of feeds and naps that I now find genuinely funny to look at. What I had not planned for properly, because you cannot plan for a thing you have never done, was how completely a tiny person rearranges your days and your nights and your sense of what you can manage.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
Forty Chairs in a Borrowed Bakkie. AI-Generated.
The morning the warehouse let me go I was a warehouse man for eleven years. Forklift, stock counts, night receiving, the lot. I was good at it, and being good at it is exactly what made me think it would last. Then the company restructured, which is a polite word for a bad morning, and on a Friday in Soweto I walked out of a gate I had walked into thousands of times, carrying a plastic packet with a mug, a spare pair of gloves, and a letter thanking me for my service.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The 4am Alarm, the Cold Pool, and the Day I Chose My Daughter's Sleep Over the Register. AI-Generated.
Before the sun, before the birds For four years my day started at ten to four in the morning. Not my daughter's day. Mine. I am the one who has to wake up first so that I can wake her, because if I let her own alarm do it she will sleep straight through it, the way healthy fourteen year old bodies are supposed to sleep. I would stand in her doorway in the dark in Pretoria, in winter when the tiles are so cold they hurt through socks, and I would say her name softly twice before I put my hand on her shoulder, because Nandi comes up out of sleep like someone surfacing from deep water, slow and disoriented, and if you startle her she is grumpy the whole way to the pool.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
She Phoned Me at Twenty Past Eleven and Said My Name Twice. AI-Generated.
The call that came in the dark My phone lit up at twenty past eleven on a Tuesday, and I knew before I answered that something was wrong, because Lerato never phones after nine. She sends voice notes. She sends the little laughing faces. She does not phone, and she certainly does not phone and then say my name twice, quietly, the way you say a name when you are trying to keep your voice from folding in half.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Cupboard Nobody Had Opened Since 2019. AI-Generated.
When they promoted me to operations coordinator, I thought the hardest part would be learning everyone's names. We are a small non-profit in Johannesburg, the kind that runs after-school reading clubs in Alexandra and a small feeding scheme out of a hall in Yeoville, and the office is three rooms above a hardware shop in Bramley with a kettle that trips the plug every second time you switch it on. There are seven of us on staff, and until March I had been the one who answered the phone, chased invoices, and knew where the spare projector cable lived. So when Thandeka, our director, called me in and said she wanted me to take over operations, I said yes before she had finished the sentence. I was proud. I phoned my mother in Rustenburg that night and she cried a little, the good kind of crying.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Guest List Got Away From Me in Kempton Park. AI-Generated.
The keys were barely warm I got the keys to my house in Kempton Park on a Thursday afternoon, and by that Thursday evening I had already made the mistake that would nearly ruin the whole thing. The house is small. Two bedrooms, a kitchen you cannot swing a cat in, a lounge that fits one couch and a television if the couch behaves itself. But it is mine. First place I have ever owned. I stood in the empty lounge with the estate agent's folder still under my arm and I felt something I had not felt in years, which was pride, plain and uncomplicated.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Check-Up I Tried to Cancel Twice Before Breakfast. AI-Generated.
An ordinary Thursday I almost skipped I am fifty-six, and I had every intention of cancelling that appointment. It was booked for a Thursday morning, and by the Wednesday night I had already talked myself halfway out of it. I felt fine. I always feel fine. That is the trap, really, of being a man of my age in this country. We are raised to believe that as long as we can still carry the gas bottle from the car and open the stuck jar for our wives, there is nothing seriously wrong with us.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Spray Booth Our Father Built, and the Day My Brother Asked to Be Paid Out. AI-Generated.
The smell you cannot describe to anyone who did not grow up in it There is a smell that lives in a panel shop and never fully leaves your clothes. It is thinners and primer and the warm dust that comes off an angle grinder, mixed with the coffee my father used to leave going cold on the parts counter. I grew up in that smell. My brother Wynand grew up in it too. Our father opened the shop in Boksburg in 1986, in a face brick building on a corner where the tar always seemed to be melting in December, and he ran it until his heart gave out on a Tuesday afternoon in 2009 while he was leaning over a Cortina bonnet.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The December The Queue Went Out The Door And We Nearly Went With It. AI-Generated.
We opened the bakery in March, which everyone told us was the sensible time to do it, a quiet start, a slow build, months to find our feet before the season came. We are a small place on a side street in Stellenbosch, not on the main tourist drag but close enough that people wander over, a bakery and deli with six little tables inside and two on the pavement under a fig tree that was the whole reason we signed the lease. My wife, Riana, is the baker. She had spent eleven years in other people's kitchens and finally wanted her own oven. I am the front, meaning I am the one who talks to people, works the counter, carries the plates, and tells the same joke about the fig tree to everyone who sits under it. We had savings, a loan from her brother, and the particular confidence of two people who have never yet been truly tested.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
