How to buy contraceptives in the USA

1. Enter campus store

2. Wonder around the 'health and sanitation' section (i.e. deodorants and caffeine pills), with one eye vainly searching for rubber johnnies, and ensuring none of one's own students/colleagues are around.

3. Conclude that they don't have them, and with a heavy sigh head to the main store at the student centre.

4. Repeat step 2, getting increasingly irate. Conclude that against all common sense the spineless, smothering University directors have decided not to sell condoms on campus for fear of alienating parents/the loony right.

5. Having worked oneself into a moral outrage so intense that one has completely forgotten about checking for the presence own students/colleagues, go up to a member of staff and complain. Loudly. Ignore any attempts by the staff member to break one's eloquence, instead focusing on the health and ethical responsibilities of the University, the (potentially highly) sexually active nature of the shop's clientele, and finishing with a damning critique of the hypocrisy displayed given the current campus-wide AIDS awareness programme.

6. Pause for breath. This allows the staff member to gently guide you to the shelf that stocks Mr Happy's Business Suits, tucked coyly behind the sanitary pads and just beneath the yeast infection treatments.

7. Grab largest box available in an effort to retain some dignity. Go to the counter, fervently hoping that the small (but not small enough), sniggering crowd are all graduating seniors and one won't be trying to lecture them about sub-mesoscale dynamics next term.

8. Hand over money, replying "fuck yes I want a bag" to the staff member's environmentally motivated question. Leave shop, vowing to buy prophylactics off the internet, or become a Catholic, or something.