A CAPital OFFense

So I get this prescription, a steroid ointment. It comes in a tube. My toes were itching and burning like they were ablaze. Eczema. Fine. I open the box for the ointment and throw the directions out. I go to apply the cream and find that a metallic seal first has to be broken. (Warning to Freudian psychoanalysts: please refrain from the obvious. Much obliged.) I use a Q-tip to break the seal, apply the cream. Great.

Then I find that the cap does not stay on. It slides off. It is too loose. I consider going back to the pharmacist. (This was last Friday, a very cold but otherwise warm-hearted, pleasant afternoon, later followed by my Saint Nicholas gig.)

"Phil, I can't seem to get this cap to stay on," I would've said.

Or, "Karen, can you help me to screw [on this cap]?" I imagined flirting with his assistant.

But, no, I don't go back to the pharmacy. I figure I'll live with it. So the cap is loose. Let the feckin thing stay loose.

But I am too anal-retentive to let this go entirely. Or at all.

I bring this issue up casually with my housemate, my partner (OK! my spouse, if you prefer).

I tell her about it.

Before I even finish a sentence, she experiences gales of laughter, paroxysms of pleasure (humorous pleasure; you all have dirty minds).

To be fair to her -- and to me -- not malicious laughter. The kind that it is easy to go along with and perhaps even laugh along with.

She informs me. No. Wait. She doesn't inform me; she silently takes the fecking cap and takes it off and puts it on via the other end.

I was wondering what the pointy cone was for. Oh! To puncture the seal! And then to reverse the cap and place it on the screw portion, the threads. O Freudimus maximus!

I told her this was easy for her because she works in a hospital. She does this sort of thing every day.

Does anyone out there know what I am talking about? Am I a retro-pre-Luddite in a modern age? Am I alone in having the universe pass me by?

If you are all laughing at me, I hate you all.

I admit to being an intellectual snob.

I may have to drop the penultimate word from that previous sentence.

Screw it. Screw you all.

Laugh. Or....

Else.