advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Phone in the Fruit Bowl, and the Brother I Drove North. AI-Generated.
The keys in the fruit bowl For about two years my younger brother Daniël kept his car keys in a fruit bowl on my kitchen counter, because for about two years I did not trust him to drive. He lived twenty minutes away but he stayed at my house more nights than not, on the couch, because I was frightened of what a quiet flat and a full bottle would do to him without anyone watching. That fruit bowl held his keys, some old batteries, a few coins, and the entire weight of a situation I did not know how to carry.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
The Golf That Sat Under a Tree For Three Years. AI-Generated.
The first thing I ever owned outright I bought that Golf with my own money when I was twenty four. A silver Mk4, a bit tired already, a hundred and ninety thousand on the clock, bought off a guy in Boksburg who clearly loved it more than his own children and made me promise to look after it. I did look after it. I washed it on Sundays in my mother's driveway in Benoni, I saved for proper tyres instead of the cheap ones, I knew the sound of every part of it. It was the first thing in my life that was fully mine, not financed, not shared, not borrowed. My name, my keys, my car.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
The Ringtone I Set to Silent, and the Debt I Could Not. AI-Generated.
The drawer where I kept my phone For most of a year and a half, I kept my personal phone in the second drawer of my kitchen units, on silent, face down, under a tea towel. I told my sister it was because I did not want to be distracted in the evenings. That was a lie I had almost come to believe myself. The truth was that the phone rang all day with numbers I did not recognise, and every one of them was someone I owed money to, and I had discovered that I could not feel the specific dread those calls caused if I simply could not hear or see the phone. So into the drawer it went, under the tea towel, and I got very good at pretending it was not there.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
The Wedding Weekend We Nearly Ran Out of Sheets. AI-Generated.
The job I thought I understood When I took over as manager of a small lodge in the Drakensberg, I thought I knew what the job was. Guests, bookings, the restaurant, keeping the staff happy, keeping the roof from leaking, smiling at people at breakfast when I had been awake since four with a generator problem. I came from a front of house background. I could run a floor, I could handle a difficult guest, I could talk a wedding party down off a ledge. What I could not do, it turned out, was the single least glamorous thing in the whole operation, and it very nearly ruined me in my third month.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
The Year the Muesli Outgrew Our Hands. AI-Generated.
A recipe that was never meant to leave the kitchen My mother made a toasted oat mix every winter for as long as I can remember. Oats, sunflower seeds, a little honey, whatever nuts were cheap that month, and a handful of dried pears she cut herself with a paring knife that had lost most of its handle. She kept it in an old sweet tin on top of the fridge, and if you were sick or sad or just passing through the kitchen at the wrong moment, she would tip some into a bowl and stand there until you ate it.
By Josh Maraney9 days ago in Journal
The Morning My Knees Voted Against Me. AI-Generated.
The dawn I nearly quit There is a particular sound a man in his early sixties makes when he tries to get up off a ground mattress at half past four in the morning. It is not a word. It is more of a low, negotiating groan, the sort of noise you might hear from a diesel bakkie that has been left out in the cold and would rather not start today. I made that sound in the Kruger, at Satara, on a July morning so crisp that the inside of the tent flap had gone stiff, and my wife Marina, who was already up and had the kettle whispering on the gas, did not even turn around. She just said, without any particular sympathy, "Take your time, Bruce."
By Josh Maraney10 days ago in Journal
The Bride's Hem I Could Not See. AI-Generated.
There is a particular silence that falls over a room when you have made a mistake with your hands. Not a loud silence. A small one. The kind that lives in the space between your own breathing and the thing you have just done wrong. I know that silence very well now. I met it properly for the first time on a Thursday afternoon in Bez Valley, with a wedding dress across my lap and a bride due in ninety minutes.
By Josh Maraney10 days ago in Journal
The Corner Shop My Aunt Left Me. AI-Generated.
The Cracked Lintel And The Pigeons The first time I went back after the letter from the lawyer, I stood in the ruined back room and did not move for a long time. There was a lintel above the old storeroom door, a heavy grey beam that had held up that part of the wall since before I was born, and it had split down the middle. The crack ran across it like a mouth that had opened and stayed open. Above it the ceiling had sagged and let in a wedge of sky. Pigeons had moved in through the gap. They shifted and muttered on the broken rafters, and when I stepped on a loose board two of them clattered out into the light, and I felt my heart go with them.
By Josh Maraney10 days ago in Journal
The Cruiser, the Concrete, and My Granddaughter's First Big Mess. AI-Generated.
The afternoon it all went sideways It was a Thursday in late autumn, and the light in Bloemfontein was doing that low golden thing it does before winter properly bites. Lerato was under the old Land Cruiser with a drain pan, or rather she thought she had the drain pan lined up, and I was on the far side wiping my hands and telling her to take her time. She is fifteen. She has more nerve than most of the apprentices I worked with over forty years, but nerve without aim is how you end up wearing a sump full of old engine oil.
By Josh Maraney10 days ago in Journal
The Sunday It Was My Turn. AI-Generated.
The phone call I did not want It was a Tuesday when Lindiwe phoned, and I knew before she spoke that something was different, because Lindiwe never phones on a Tuesday. She is my sister-in-law, my late brother's wife, and for eleven years she has hosted the family Sunday lunch at her house in Kempton Park without ever once making it look like effort. Her voice was thin down the line. The operation had been moved forward. The doctor wanted her flat on her back for at least three weeks, no lifting, no standing over a stove, none of the things she does so naturally that the rest of us have never had to think about them.
By Josh Maraney10 days ago in Journal
