S01:E22
Two in the morning, February. A child is coughing, you go to the kitchen for the cough syrup, and by the torch on your phone you read a date that ran out in November. This isn’t a story about someone who can’t run a household. It’s a story about the fact that we go through the medicine cabinet in a crisis — never before one.
This episode is about something deeply unfashionable: the walk-through. You sit down in September or October, before the season starts, and go through the cabinet before anyone is ill. Not a tidy-up — four questions you answer, and you come out with a list.
The four questions:
An honest word about what the app hasn’t got. The episode turns on a bottle of syrup opened eight months ago whose expiry date says 2027. For some products — syrups, drops, ointments — a separate, shorter period applies once opened; you’ll find it in the leaflet, and sometimes on the packaging. There is no field in the app for the date you opened a package, and we say so plainly rather than inventing a workaround. That one is a job for a person: pick up the package and ask at the chemist’s.
What the app does do in this episode: an “Expiring medications” screen with a separate tab for anything already out of date; a refill threshold you set on a medicine; a shopping list that gathers on its own whatever is past its date and whatever has dropped to that threshold or below, with rows you can add by hand, three filters, and sharing limited to the rows you’ve ticked. Every cabinet shows three numbers — how many medicines, how many expiring soon, how many below threshold — read from the phone’s own memory, so it works with no signal.
What the app does NOT do: it doesn’t tell you what to keep in the house for the season, doesn’t work out doses, and doesn’t judge whether a medicine still works or is safe to take. The walk-through is stocktaking, not treatment — and it doesn’t settle for you whether you can use something in February. That stays a question for the pharmacist.
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About AI in this episode. The dialogue was written by Tomasz Szuster. The voices you hear are not ours — they are AI-generated synthetic voices. Full details are in the show description and in the episode outro. We say this plainly, because we think it should be the standard for any podcast made this way.
