advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
My Grandmother Never Trusted a Bank, and She Taught Me More About Money Than Any App Ever Did. AI-Generated.
The woman who paid for everything in person My grandmother, whom we all called Mama Joyce, lived in the same house in Tembisa for fifty-one years and never once in her life owned a debit card. She had a bank account, technically, opened for her by my uncle in the nineties, but she treated it the way you might treat a distant relative you did not fully trust. She put nothing in it if she could help it, and she took her money out in cash the moment it arrived.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
My Son's Teacher Said He Was Bright but Somewhere Else, and I Spent a Year Learning What She Meant. AI-Generated.
The parents' evening that started everything The sentence that changed our year was said kindly, over a small desk in a classroom that smelled of glue and floor polish. My son's teacher, a patient woman named Mrs Adams, folded her hands and told me that Daniel was one of the brightest children she taught and also, most of the time, somewhere else entirely. He is here, she said, tapping the desk, but he is not here, and she tapped her own forehead.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
My Whole Income Ran Off One Phone, and I Treated It Like a Miracle That Never Needed Charging. AI-Generated.
The morning it all caught up with me I make short videos for small brands. Cafes, a couple of clothing labels, a gym in Sea Point that pays late but pays. It is not glamorous. It is one woman, a phone that shoots better than my first three cameras combined, and an ability to be in the right place with the light doing something interesting. For three years my entire livelihood has run through a single device that lives in my hand more than my hand lives anywhere else.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
I Won the Biggest Catering Order of My Life and Nearly Lost It Over a Deposit. AI-Generated.
The order that should have been pure joy I run a small catering business out of a converted garage in Boksburg. Just me, my sister-in-law Thandi who does the desserts, and two part-time women who come in when the orders are big. For eight years it has been a hand to mouth kind of success, the kind where the books balance but only just, and where a single unpaid invoice can turn a good month into a bad one.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
A Dutch Colleague Asked to See the Real Johannesburg, and I Realised I Had Never Seen It Either. AI-Generated.
The question I could not answer Marieke flew in from Utrecht for a two week project handover, and on her second evening, over a plate of pap and chakalaka she attacked with the enthusiasm of a woman who had done her reading, she asked me a simple question. She wanted to see Soweto. Not the airport version of South Africa, not the winelands, not Camps Bay where I had already taken her because it is easy and it photographs well. She wanted to understand where the country actually turned.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Locksmith Cut Three Keys and I Only Needed One. AI-Generated.
The Boxes That Fit in a Corolla When I left, I did not take much. Sixteen years of a marriage compresses strangely. You think it will need a truck and in the end it needs a Corolla with the back seats folded down, four boxes, a standing lamp my mother gave me for my thirtieth birthday, and a suitcase of clothes I packed in under an hour because I did not trust myself to linger over any of it. Dean kept the house in Bedfordview. I kept the good pots, my late father's watch, and a strange, humming kind of relief that I was ashamed to feel so soon.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
Three Years Late to Our Own Honeymoon
The Wedding We Never Followed Up On We got married on a Thursday because the venue was cheaper midweek, and forty people came, and my aunt cried during the vows the way she cries at everything including adverts for insurance. Sarah wore her mother's shoes because we didn't have the budget for new ones and honestly she looked better in them than anything we could have bought. At the end of the night, sweating in my hired suit, I told her we'd do a proper honeymoon once things settled. I remember saying that exact word, settled, like it was a place we'd eventually arrive at rather than a thing that kept moving further off whenever we got close.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
Learning to Read My Father's Floor. AI-Generated.
The Phone Call That Changed Everything My father died on a Tuesday in March, at his desk, with a cup of rooibos going cold beside a stack of invoices he never got to sign. I found out from my mother's shaking voice on the phone while I was standing in a school car park waiting to collect my son. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I still had to buy milk on the way home. Grief does that. It sits right next to the ordinary and refuses to let the ordinary go on without it.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
What the Elephants Taught Me About Waiting. AI-Generated.
The year that emptied me out I had been a doctor for twenty two years before I stopped being able to sleep. It did not happen all at once. It happened the way rust happens, quietly, in places you cannot see until the metal gives way. Three patients died on my watch in one stretch of four months, and though I could recite the clinical reasons for each of them, could stand in front of a review board and explain every decision without flinching, none of that stopped me from lying awake at three in the morning replaying their faces. I am an emergency room physician. I have always told people that the job is triage, that you learn to carry loss the way you carry a badge, clipped on, visible, but not the whole of you. That year it became the whole of me. I stopped tasting food. I snapped at my sister on the phone for no reason and then cried about it in a supply closet. A colleague finally told me, not unkindly, that I looked like a woman who had forgotten how to exhale.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Light Under Her Door at One A.M.. AI-Generated.
The Year Grace Got Quiet My daughter Grace was always the loud one at dinner, the one narrating her day before anyone asked, the one who left half-finished friendship bracelets on every surface of the house. Somewhere around the start of ninth grade, in Ohio, that stopped. It did not happen all at once, or I would have noticed sooner and maybe done something sooner. It happened the way a tide goes out, so slowly you only realize the water is gone when you look up and the boats are sitting in mud.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
