SMIT-WIT-FISS

Some people use clocks and calendars to measure the passage of time. I use my SMTWTFS.

Oh, you don’t know what a SMTWTFS is? It’s one of those little plastic thingumabobs that holds your pills. It has a separate box for each day of the week, each box labeled with the initial of the day: thus, SMTWTFS. I pronounce it “Smit-Wit-Fiss.”

Every evening, I pop open my SMTWTFS and remove that day’s supply of Old Man Medicine: baby aspirin, statin pill, fish oil capsules, vitamin D... plus an anti-allergy pill in the springtime, when pollen lies thick on the land. I swallow the small handful of pills and capsules in one gulp, chased by a shot of water straight from the bathroom tap. (She Who Must Be Obeyed is appalled by the fact that I drink bathroom water, believing that it somehow becomes contaminated by Poop-Cooties by virtue of its passage through pipes located within fifty feet of a Water-Closet. Go figure.)

Once all the boxes are empty, it is of course time to reload. I fill each of the seven compartments with my various medicaments, taking that evening’s dose directly out of the bottles. Thus I only have to recharge the SMTWTFS once every eight days. That’s efficiency for you!

And thus I gauge the passage of my days, eight at a time. O, how they fly in their octal progression, alas!