advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
I Bought the Watch to Prove I Had Made It. I Sold It to Prove I Was Not Finished.. AI-Generated.
There is a photograph of me from the day I collected the watch. I am grinning like a fool outside the shop, holding the little green box, a boy from Mamelodi who had somehow ended up buying the thing rich men wore. Eleven years later I sat at my kitchen table and decided to sell it, and I was not grinning at all.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Fifty Rand Rule That Kept My Saturdays From Swallowing Me. AI-Generated.
My uncle used to say that football is the only religion where the whole congregation argues with the referee. I grew up inside that religion, in a small town in the Eastern Cape, and I have loved it my whole life. This is not really a story about betting. It is a story about a friend I could not save, and the fifty rand rule I made afterwards so that I would never become him.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Jewellery Box I Could Not Look At for Two Years. AI-Generated.
For two years the jewellery box sat on the top shelf of my cupboard, behind the winter blankets, in the exact spot where I put things I cannot deal with. I knew what was inside. That was the problem.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Trip Two Old Friends Kept Promising Each Other for Thirty Years. AI-Generated.
Thembi and I made the promise in 1994, in a tiny flat with a leaking geyser, over a bottle of cheap wine we could barely afford, both of us convinced our real lives were about to begin. One day, we said, when there is money and time, we will go somewhere wild together. It took us thirty years to keep that promise.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Phone Call I Made From My Car in a Pick n Pay Parking Lot. AI-Generated.
I made the call that saved my life sitting in my car in a shopping centre parking lot, engine off, hands shaking, a warm bottle of vodka in a brown paper bag on the passenger seat because I had not been able to wait until I got home.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
My Father Hid Gold Coins in a Biscuit Tin, and I Spent a Winter Learning What to Do With Them. AI-Generated.
The biscuit tin was in the back of my father's wardrobe, under a folded army blanket that smelled of mothballs and the seventies. I found it three weeks after we buried him, on the kind of grey Highveld afternoon where the whole house feels like it is holding its breath.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
My Children Clubbed Together to Send Us Into the Bush, and I Spent Weeks Convinced It Could Not Be Done. AI-Generated.
The envelope arrived at our anniversary dinner, passed across the table by my eldest with the nervous grin of someone who has spent more than they should. Inside was a printed itinerary and a note in my daughter's handwriting that said, simply, You are going on safari, Abba, and no, you cannot give it back.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Day the Supplement Wall Finally Made Sense to Me. AI-Generated.
Standing There, Completely Lost I still remember the exact moment I felt out of my depth. It was the middle of the year, that strange stretch when the January promises have faded and you either quietly give up or decide to get serious. I had decided to get serious. I had been back at the gym for a few weeks, my body ached in places I had forgotten existed, and a friend kept telling me I needed to sort out my nutrition if I wanted any of the effort to stick. So I went looking for supplements, and that is where the trouble started.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
How I Learned to Trust the Little Kosher Symbol on My Family's Food. AI-Generated.
The symbol I stared at for years without understanding For most of my life I treated the small Kosher symbol on a package the way I treat the recycling triangle. I knew it meant something, I knew it mattered, but if you had stopped me in the aisle and asked me what it actually stood for, I would have gone quiet. I keep Kosher. My parents kept Kosher, and their parents kept Kosher before them, so the habit of scanning a label for a mark is older than I am. What I did not have, for an embarrassingly long time, was any real understanding of who put that mark there, what they checked, or why I should trust it more than a company simply printing a nice word on a box.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Day I Realised Our Warehouse Was One Spill Away From a Disaster. AI-Generated.
The morning that started my worry I run the floor at a warehouse just outside Boksburg, and for years I told myself we were fine. We stored drums of oil and diesel, we kept a few tubs of chemicals for cleaning and maintenance, and nothing had ever gone badly wrong. That was my whole safety plan, honestly. Nothing had gone wrong yet, so surely nothing would.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
How Mashatu Turned My Idea of a Safari Upside Down. AI-Generated.
The Doubt I Carried All The Way To The Border For weeks before the trip I kept asking myself whether I had made a mistake. I had booked a stay at Mashatu, in the Northern Tuli corner of eastern Botswana, and the more I read the more nervous I became. Everyone I knew who had been on safari described the same thing, a padded seat in a raised vehicle, a guide pointing at something in the distance, and hours of driving between sightings. I am not the sort of person who sits still easily. I get restless. I like to move, to feel the ground under me, to be part of a place rather than a spectator gliding through it. So I worried that I had signed up for something that would leave me stiff, detached and quietly bored.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
