advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Morning I Carried Nine Pounds of Person Toward the Atlantic. AI-Generated.
The car was packed like we were fleeing something I want to start with the trunk of the car, because the trunk of the car tells you everything about the kind of man I had become in the four months since Nora was born.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Drum I Could Not Afford to Fill. AI-Generated.
The Tuesday it landed I was standing at the mixing tank with a plastic paddle in one hand and my phone in the other when the email came through. My hands smelled of pine, the way they always do by ten in the morning, because we had been decanting floor polish into twenty five litre drums since seven. My phone buzzed against the steel of the tank. I nearly ignored it. We get a lot of emails at Kefiloe Chemicals, most of them from suppliers wanting money or people wanting samples they never buy.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Lift at the Insurance Building Taught Me to Hold My Breath. AI-Generated.
The morning I stopped wearing anything at all I remember the exact day because it was my niece's christening, and I spent most of it in the church car park in Pinetown with my forehead against the steering wheel. The service had barely started. Someone two pews ahead had come in wearing a heavy floral spray, the kind that arrives a full second before the person does, and by the second hymn the right side of my head had begun to tighten like a strap being pulled through a buckle. I knew the sequence by then. First the strap. Then the light going strange and grainy at the edges. Then the nausea that made me grip the wooden pew and count my own breathing.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Photo I Almost Wasn't In. AI-Generated.
The tackle I still feel There is a small chip on the corner of my left front tooth, and I know its exact shape the way you know the ceiling above your childhood bed. It happened on a Wednesday night at an artificial turf pitch off Rivonia Road, one of those five-a-side courts lit up like a fish tank while the rest of Sandton went home for supper. I was thirty then, or close to it, playing in a league that meant nothing to anyone except the eight of us who took it far too seriously. A guy called Tebogo went in for a fifty-fifty ball, I went in a fraction later, and somewhere in the collision my own knee came up and caught me. My tooth met bone. I heard it more than I felt it, a dry little tick, and then the taste of a two-rand coin flooded my mouth.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Weekend the Storeroom Ceiling Gave Way. AI-Generated.
The wall we called the archive I have worked the front desk of a physiotherapy clinic in Pietermaritzburg for eleven years, and for most of them my whole professional life lived on one wall. Lever-arch files, spine after spine, going back to before I started. Cardboard concertina folders stuffed under the counter for the overflow. A row of grey filing cabinets that stuck in humid weather so you had to lift the drawer slightly and swear at it before it slid.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Morning I Packed Her Whole Life Into A Bakkie. AI-Generated.
The list on the fridge For three weeks there was a list stuck to our fridge with a magnet shaped like a pineapple, and every morning while the kettle boiled I read it again. Mattress. Pots, the small one and the big one. The kettle itself, because she said the ones in the city cost too much. A duvet. Two towels. A lamp. It was such a short list for a whole life, and yet every time I looked at it my chest went tight, because I knew what it really meant. It meant my Nomsa was leaving.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Morning a Jar of Apricot Jam Sent Me Back to School. AI-Generated.
The question I kept dodging It started with a woman named Ruth who came to my table at the Trinity Bellwoods market almost every Saturday. She had a canvas tote with a broken strap that she refused to replace, and she always bought two jars, one apricot and one sour cherry. For most of a summer she would pick up a jar, turn it over, read the label like she was checking a contract, and put it in her bag without a word.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Morning I Realised Johannesburg No Longer Needed Me There. AI-Generated.
The email that ended an era The message came on a Tuesday, tucked between a sprint retro and a calendar invite I had already decided to skip. Our landlord would not be renewing the office lease, and the company had decided not to look for a new one. We were remote now, permanently, all of us, the whole team scattered across suburbs and provinces and one guy who had quietly moved to Mauritius and never told anyone. I read it twice. I had worked in that building in Bryanston for six years. I knew which lift was slow and which bathroom had the good light and which security guard supported Kaizer Chiefs loudly enough to start arguments on Monday mornings. And just like that, none of it mattered anymore.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
What Aunt Miems Left Me Was Not Really a House. AI-Generated.
The phone call that made me an executor My Aunt Miems died on a Tuesday in April, in the room she was born in, in a face-brick house in Bellville that still had the same green Formica kitchen table she had eaten off for sixty years. I was in Durban when my phone rang. My mother told me in that flat voice people use when they have already cried themselves out, and then she said the sentence that would swallow the next eleven months of my life. Miems had named me as the executor.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
