advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Filing Cabinet That Fell Through the Floor of My Father's Practice. AI-Generated.
My father was a conveyancing attorney in Durban for thirty-eight years, and he did not trust anything he could not hold in his hand. When I say he did not trust computers, I mean it literally. He had a desktop machine that he used to check the cricket scores and nothing else. Every deed, every contract, every letter, every note scribbled on the back of another note, lived in paper. Manila folders, ring binders, and a wall of steel filing cabinets that had been there so long the linoleum had permanent dents where their feet stood.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The 1998 Corolla My Late Husband Refused to Bury, and the Engine That Brought It Back. AI-Generated.
My husband Sipho drove the same white 1998 Toyota Corolla for twenty-two years. When he died, the car was still in our driveway in Germiston, and I could not bring myself to sell it, even though I had a perfectly good car of my own and this one sat there gathering leaves and slowly losing its shine.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Morning I Found Three of My Own Hairs on the Pillow and Counted Them Like a Madman. AI-Generated.
I want to start by admitting something that will sound vain. The first time I noticed my hair was really going, I was standing in my bathroom in Bloemfontein at half past six in the morning, and I counted the hairs on my pillow. There were seven. I lined them up on the white cotton with the tip of my finger, like a detective, and I stood there in my underwear feeling my whole idea of myself tilt sideways.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Ball Bearing That Ended Up in a Loaf of Bread With My Name on It. AI-Generated.
I have worked in and around a flour mill for nineteen years, and for most of that time I believed that the biggest danger in the building was the dust. Flour dust will explode if you give it half a chance and a spark, and we drilled for that, we respected that. What I did not respect, and what nearly ended my career and possibly someone's life, was a single ball bearing about the size of a pea.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Bottle My Grandmother Left Behind Smelled Like Nothing You Can Buy in a Mall. AI-Generated.
When my grandmother died in Pietermaritzburg, she left me three things that mattered. A butter dish with a chip on the lid. A photograph of her standing outside the Oriental Plaza in a dress I never saw her wear again. And a tiny glass bottle, no taller than my thumb, with a black screw cap and about half a teaspoon of dark amber liquid inside.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Eleventh Time I Packed Boxes, I Decided I Was Done Renting. AI-Generated.
I worked it out one Sunday while taping up a box, which is a very on-brand way for me to have a revelation. I counted the times I had moved as an adult, and the number came to eleven. Eleven times I had wrapped my glasses in newspaper. Eleven times I had begged friends with bakkies for a Saturday. Eleven times I had cleaned an oven that was not really mine so that a landlord I would never see again could keep a deposit that was. I was thirty-eight years old, I had a decent job, and I had nothing to show for a decade and a half of dutifully paying rent except a very refined system for packing plates. That Sunday, kneeling on the floor of yet another flat I would soon leave, I got angry in a quiet, useful way. I decided I was done.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Number That Decided How Fairly My Divorce Would End. AI-Generated.
When people picture a divorce falling apart, they imagine shouting, slammed doors, lawyers with raised voices. Mine did not fall apart like that. Mine got stuck, for the better part of a year, on a number. One number, attached to one house, the house in Durban North where my two children had learned to walk and where my marriage had slowly and quietly stopped being one. Everything else we could eventually agree on. Who kept which car. How the school fees would be split. But the house sat between us like a boulder, and the reason was that my husband and I could not agree on what it was worth, and neither of us, it turned out, actually knew.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Small Factory in Krugersdorp Where I Learned My Chutney Was Not As Simple As I Thought. AI-Generated.
My chutney business began, like a lot of stubborn small businesses, at a kitchen table with a recipe from a woman who is no longer alive to be asked questions. My aunt Farida made a chutney that people in our family fought over at Eid, and when she passed I inherited the pot she made it in and, more importantly, the exact way she balanced the vinegar against the sugar so it was sharp without being cruel. I started making it for friends. Friends started paying. And by the time I am telling you about, I had a small unit in an industrial park in Krugersdorp, three staff, and jars going into a handful of independent grocers on the West Rand.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Year I Stopped Studying at the Kitchen Table and Learned What a Desk Could Do. AI-Generated.
Nobody in my family had gone to university before me, so when I got in, none of us really knew what we did not know. We knew about fees. We knew about textbooks, roughly, and that they would be expensive. What none of us thought about, because how would we, was where I would actually live and how much that single decision would shape everything else. In my family the plan was simple. My cousin had a flat in the city, I would sleep on the couch, and I would save everyone a fortune. It sounded like wisdom. It was, I now understand, one of the worst plans I have ever agreed to.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Report Card That Finally Made Me Stop Blaming My Son. AI-Generated.
I want to start with the thing I am least proud of, because if I skip it none of the rest will make sense. For most of my son Kabelo's Grade 3 and Grade 4 years, I thought he was lazy. I said it to him. I said it to my wife. I said it to my own mother on the phone while she went quiet in that way she has when she disagrees but has decided to let me arrive at the truth on my own. Kabelo was lazy, and if he simply concentrated, if he simply tried, the marks would come. That was my whole theory of my child.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
Ninety People, One Small Hall, and a Ceiling I Kept Looking At. AI-Generated.
Our street runs a lunch every Freedom Day. It started years ago as one family putting out a pot on the pavement and it has grown, the way these things do when nobody officially decides they should, into a proper sit down meal for anyone on the road who wants to come. Old people who live alone. The families with too many mouths and not enough month. The two brothers at number twelve who never say much but always arrive early to help carry. Somewhere along the way I became the person who organises it, mostly because I made the mistake of being good at it once.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
