You’re the GUY. YOU do it.
on January 28, 2019 at 1:01 amChapter: An It's Walky! Prophylactique
Characters: David Walkerton, Joyce Brown
Location: inconvenience store
Honestly, the anxiety over needing to buy more condoms in public probably should have kept these two from doing it a second time for like another ten years.
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You know what’s fun is when you’re the girl buying large condoms and a buddy is the cashier
not autobiographical at all
See, I always enjoyed taking one of those huge 30 packs up to the counter and watching the cashier’s expression as I calmly made my purchase.
well I imagine they sell enough over multiple shifts, but it was the fact it was me
Naw – I’m sure one of them could have figured out how to order condom online.
… and how to buy a PO Box…
This was in the early 2000s, yeah? I’m not sure they’d have many online purchase options
Not that I’d know. I turned 7 in late 2000
I am relieved to know you weren’t trying to buy condoms online in 2000, then.
This takes place in 2004, I believe (since Shortpacked! started in 2005) so…
And a quick google search shows that, yes, Amazon.com did indeed sell condoms back in 2004.
But then they’d have to wait for the condoms to arrive in the mail, and from the previous strip it’s pretty clear Joyce wouldn’t want to wait that long.
Not to mention that with the martians coming to attack the Earth, nobody will have the time to deliver those condoms.
True. However, Willis’ comment indicated that it would take “another ten years” – surely online shopping would be faster than THAT.
All Walky really needed was to start seeking out public bathrooms and a roll of quarters.
JOYCE: “I was kind of hoping to avoid the clerk laughing at the plain-Jane church mouse who thinks she is going to get some!”
One of the sweet yet funny things about these two is that neither of them think that they are worthy of the other. Maybe that’s a good sign for the long-term!
Or a bad sign for their mental health. /pʌtʰeidoʌ/, /pʌtʰaːdoʌ/.
I’m nearly 50 and have been married for 28 years and STILL probably couldn’t buy condoms in public. (Although clearly I did pre-vasectomy. That’s been a while. Anyway.) Anxiety’s a bitch.
I did see someone point out here they can be ordered online nowadays and it blew my mind, except for the part where, again, I don’t actually need to do it.
I just noticed the Chapter Name and am cracking up.
…yeah, I don’t actually get this one. I mean, intellectually I follow where it comes from, and god knows I’ve got anxiety so I can extrapolate, but I very mercifully got missed with the pervasive shame about bodily functions in general and reproductive ones in specific and lacking that makes this… kinda weird, and also sad. (I think it was a combo of personality + decent parents, cos fuck knows that shame was pervasive in semi-rural TN. Like, we were living in a very blue, arts-focused patch of semi-rural TN, but… I still grew up very aware of the fringes of the evangelical Bubble, soooo.)
I do wonder sometimes if there are people who get as freaked out about buying toilet paper and kleenex in public? Because that’s what stuff like condoms and menstrual products are classed with, in my head — it’s all stuff we use for managing bodily functions.
*raises hand*
I am almost as shy about buying toilet paper as I am about buying pads. Not like, about being in the store and buying them, but about walking home with them — sometimes it feels worth the bag tax. I feel similarly about buying condoms.
Having been the “little dorky kid who thinks he’s going to get some”, I can attest that condom anxiety is very much A Thing. I remember always having to throw in a soda and some snack food to disguise what I was actually there for.
Pretty sure that, at least outside of small towns where the odds are high you personally know the cashier, their family, etc, the typical register monkey Gives No Fucks. You are one more face in an endless stream before their next break; your purchases tallied, bagged and forgotten in the same breath.
(Speaking from my own cashier experience here, though I admit I’ve not actually worked grocery.)
Buying condoms in Chicago is sometimes embarrassing because CVS puts ’em in a locked cabinet and then sometimes the “help” button next to the case doesn’t work and so you have to ask the cashier and they have to page someone to unlock the cabinet and then they make you point out the pack you want and walk you back up to the register with the condoms and it’s a whole public spectacle.