advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Appointment I Kept Putting Off Was the One I Most Needed to Keep. AI-Generated.
I am very good at looking after everyone except myself. If you had asked me, I would have told you that of course I take my health seriously, and I would have believed it. But the truth was sitting there in the small pile of things I kept meaning to do and never did, and near the top of that pile, for longer than I want to admit, was a simple breast check. Not because I was frightened, at least not in a way I let myself notice. More because it was the kind of appointment that is always easy to move. There was always a busier week, a school event, a work deadline, a reason to say I would sort it out next month.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
I Thought a Till System Would Cost Me the Whole Startup Budget.. AI-Generated.
When I was putting together the numbers to open my cafe, the thing that nearly stopped me before I started was not the coffee machine or the rent. It was the till. Every time I researched how modern shops actually take payment and track their stock, I ran into the same intimidating picture in my head: a big expensive system, a lump sum I would have to hand over before I had sold a single flat white. I had convinced myself that a proper setup was something you bought outright, once, painfully, and that it was a luxury for businesses already making money, not for someone like me still counting every rand.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
I Almost Let Winter Undo a Year of Gym Work. AI-Generated.
I want to start with the wrong idea I was carrying, because it is the whole reason this story exists. For most of my life I assumed that winter was simply a season you survived, fitness wise. You hold the line, you eat a bit more than you should, and you promise yourself that the real work starts again when the mornings warm up.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
I Thought Pawning My Car Meant Losing It. I Was Wrong.. AI-Generated.
The thing about a cash problem is that it never arrives when you have room for it. Mine turned up in the middle of the year, right when the second school term started and the winter electricity bill landed and my car needed something done to it as well. I am not a person who lives on credit. I had spent years paying off my car, and by 2026 it was fully mine, no finance, nothing owing, the registration in my own name. And yet there I was, staring at a short list of expenses that all wanted to be paid in the same fortnight, with not enough in the account to cover them.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
I Walked In Ready to Argue. My Son's Brain Map Ended the Argument.. AI-Generated.
I need to admit up front that I went into this convinced it was not going to work, and I brought that attitude into the room with me. My son had been diagnosed with ADHD, we had tried the usual routes, and I had reached the point that a lot of parents reach where you are exhausted and quietly certain that the next thing someone suggests will be another dead end. When a friend mentioned brain training, my first reaction was close to a laugh. It sounded like the kind of thing you see advertised with too many exclamation marks. I only agreed to look into it because I had run out of better ideas, not because I believed in it.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
I Was Losing the Fight Against Dust, and I Blamed the Wrong Thing
I run a small operation, nothing on the scale of a big mine, but we move enough material over enough gravel that dust has always been part of the job. For years I treated it the way I imagine most people do, which is to say I treated it as weather. Something that happened to us. Something we endured. When it got bad, we sent the water truck out, wet the road down, and got a few hours of peace before the whole cycle started again. I genuinely believed that was the job, and that anyone who complained about dust on a working site simply did not understand what a working site was.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
I Booked It Expecting a Resort. It Was Just Us and the Sea.
The whole trip started with a misunderstanding that I did not clear up until we had actually arrived. When my sister found the place and sent me the link, I skimmed it, saw the words private and beach house, and filed it in my head as a nice resort with a fancy way of describing its rooms. I assumed there would be a reception desk, other families, a buffet, the usual choreography of a busy coastal hotel. I packed for that. I mentally prepared for that. I was completely wrong, and I have rarely been so glad to be wrong.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Spill Kit on Our Wall Was a Prop and I Only Found Out the Hard Way
For about two years I walked past the spill kit on our warehouse wall and felt quietly reassured by it. It was mounted where the auditor could see it, it had the right label, and it ticked a box on a form I signed every quarter. I genuinely believed we were covered. That belief lasted right up until the morning a drum of hydraulic oil let go near the loading bay, and I pulled the kit down and discovered that most of what was supposed to be inside it had been quietly borrowed, used, and never replaced. Half the absorbents were gone. What was left did not go anywhere near far enough. We spent the next hour doing an undignified scramble with rags and cardboard while the oil crept toward a drain, and I stood there realising the difference between being ready and only looking ready.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
I Spent Three Safaris Staring at Leaves Before I Learned to Go in Winter
For a long time I was convinced a safari had to happen in summer. That was the whole picture in my head, green grass, warm nights, everything lush and glowing the way it looks on the brochures. So for three trips in a row I went in the warmer months, and for three trips in a row I came home with a memory card full of foliage and very little else. I would catch a shape shifting somewhere in the thick green, lift the camera, and by the time I found it in the frame the animal had already melted back into the leaves. I told myself that was simply how it went. Wildlife is shy, I am unlucky, maybe next time. It honestly never occurred to me that I had the season completely upside down.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
We Nearly Skipped Africa Over the Food, and I Am So Glad We Did Not
The first time my husband suggested Africa, I said no almost before he finished the sentence. Not because I did not want to see it, I have wanted to see it my whole life, but because in my head a kosher trip that far from home meant one thing: a suitcase packed with tins, a cooler bag we would guard like a newborn, and two weeks of eating things out of packets while everyone else ate properly. We had done a version of that once, years earlier, on a trip where the kashrut planning swallowed the whole holiday, and I had quietly promised myself never again. So when the word safari came up, my brain went straight to the logistics and shut the idea down.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Machine I Was Sure We Could Not Afford to Replace
For the better part of two years, the worst part of my week happened at the end of our line. I run production for a small juice bottling operation just outside Johannesburg, and for a long time our end of line packing was held together with tape, temporary staff, and a secondhand shrink wrapper we had bought from an agent who imported it and then, as far as I could tell, disappeared. When the machine behaved, everything was fine. When it did not, which was more often than I would like to admit, we waited. Once we waited nearly three weeks for a single heating element to arrive from a supplier in Europe, and in the meantime four of us wrapped trays by hand in a cold room while the orders stacked up.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
