advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Glass on the Windowsill. AI-Generated.
The Move When Pieter and I bought our five acre plot outside Tarlton, west of Johannesburg, I remember standing in the empty kitchen with the removal van still idling in the driveway and feeling like we had finally done the thing everyone in our old townhouse complex talked about doing and never did. We had chickens within a month. We had a vegetable patch marked out with string and pegs before we had curtains up. And we had a borehole, already drilled by the previous owners, with a pump that kicked on with a satisfying thunk somewhere out near the old stable wall.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Building My Mother Warned Me About. AI-Generated.
Leaving Cala With a Suitcase and a Warning I grew up in Cala, a small town in the Eastern Cape where everybody's business belonged to everybody, where the taxi rank closed by dark and the loudest thing on a Sunday was the church bell. When the call came that I had got the job in Johannesburg, an entry level admin position at a logistics company in the city, I screamed so loudly that my grandmother's chickens scattered across the yard. My mother did not scream. She sat down on the kitchen step with her hands pressed flat against her knees and said, "Joburg eats people, Aphiwe. It eats them and it does not spit out the bones."
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
Two Car Spaces and Nowhere Else to Be. AI-Generated.
The Tuesday That Didn't Need Me I was fifty one when the company decided it no longer needed a Director of Regional Operations, which was the title they had given me eleven years earlier along with a parking spot and a laptop bag I still use for my wallet and keys. The meeting lasted fourteen minutes. I know because I looked at the clock on the wall behind the HR woman's head the whole time, the way you look at something neutral when you cannot look at the thing that is actually happening. I drove home at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday and sat in the driveway for a long time before I went inside, because I did not know what a Tuesday at eleven in the morning was supposed to look like for me anymore.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
Middle C and the Broker's Letter. AI-Generated.
The Parcel From Ontario I have taught four year olds to hold a recorder without chewing it, and I have taught eleven year olds to sing in two part harmony without covering their ears in horror at their own sound. For thirty one years that was the whole of my working life, in a school hall that smelled of floor polish and rained through one corner of the ceiling every winter. Numbers were never my language. Crotchets and quavers were my language. So when the solicitor's letter came, six months after my Aunt Position died in Toronto, telling me she had left me what she called a modest share portfolio, I honestly did not know what that sentence meant. I pictured, absurdly, an actual box of paper shares, the kind you might see in an old film, tied with ribbon.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Year I Finally Noticed the Towels. AI-Generated.
The Handover I spent thirty one years building bridges and pump stations, the kind of work where you can put a number on everything. Load tolerances, concrete curing times, the exact date a project either stands or falls. When I retired at sixty two I thought I understood what it meant to run something well. Then my wife Marietjie's knees gave out on her, properly gave out, the kind of pain that makes a woman who has never complained about anything suddenly sit down on the stairs and put her head in her hands, and I found myself the co owner, in practice the daily manager, of a six room guesthouse in a dusty Karoo dorp that I will just call Doringkraal, because half the readers of this will know exactly which town I mean anyway.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Sister Who Kept Score. AI-Generated.
The Years I Was Counting Something Else I am four years older than my brother Dean, which meant for most of our lives I was the one who knew where things were kept, who could reach the top shelf, who remembered which cousin was not speaking to which aunt. It is a particular kind of authority, being the older sister, and I liked it more than I ever admitted. So when Dean started drinking in a way that was not really about fun anymore, somewhere around his twenty sixth birthday, I told myself I would simply apply the same authority. I would notice things early. I would say the right thing at the right time and he would hear me because he always had, more or less, since he was small and I used to walk him to the shop in Observatory for chips after school.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Water Was the First Thing That Made Sense. AI-Generated.
Boxes and a Bakkie I grew up in a house in Pinelands with a jacaranda tree that dropped purple mush on the driveway every October and a garden my mother refused to let anyone else touch. That is the kind of childhood that ruins you for apartment living, or so I believed for thirty one years. When the offer came through from a software company with offices near Highveld, testing lead, better pay than I could get in Cape Town, I told my sister I would take it for eighteen months and then move home. I remember saying that out loud in her kitchen like it was a fact and not a wish.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
Thirty Five Years of Other People's Mouths. AI-Generated.
The Drawer I Kept Closing When I cleared out the practice on Baldwin Street for the last time, I found myself standing in front of the second drawer of my old instrument cabinet for a long while, not opening it, just standing there with my hand on the cool metal handle the way you might stand at the edge of a pool deciding whether the water is going to be cold. I had been a dentist for thirty five years. I had retired eleven days earlier, quietly, with a cake in the break room and a card signed by three hygienists and a receptionist named Carol who had outlasted two of my business partners. And now I was back in the empty office by myself on a Saturday morning, boxing up what was left, and there was this one drawer I had been avoiding since Tuesday.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
