If you raid other people’s bathrooms like the chicks in those stupid tampon commercials who make ropes out of them to retrieve their tampon or grab several handfulls because their friend has the “good” tampons then you deserve to be Pitted.
I was a little weirded out by the chick in the boat carrying an entire box, however if she had just bought them and wasn’t sure how long they would be out and about I suppose it’s possible someone might carry a whole box on their bag.
As for giving supplies to other women, I don’t mind helping out when I can what I hate are snobs about it. I tend to use both tampons and pads. One time, when I did not have my period and I only had a small pad for light days in my purse, someone in school asked for a tampon and I offered the pad as it was all I had with me. She acted like I had handed her a dirty sock to stuff between her legs. I was tempted to tell her she could just bleed all over her clothes if she preferred not to use a pad. She took it but she and her friend could be heard making disparaging comments about pads afterwards. Why do some girls think stuffing a wad of cotton up your twat makes you so much cooler than anybody else?
Heh, I got that product snobbery recently from a girlfriend. We were hanging at my house and she suddenly made the alarm face and got up to scurry to the bathroom. I called out “under the sink, motrin in the cabinet” and figured she’d root around and find whatever she preferred. There’s teensy thin liners, mondo over-night pillowy pads, non-applicator OB’s, super and teen slim tampons, about the only thing I don’t have in there are the cups.
Apparently the first thing she saw were the huge pads and didn’t look further, instead of saying anything to me about it she just dealt with it and I never gave it a second thought. Couple days later we’re at her house with another friend and it comes up, something like “You won’t believe that Tonya still uses the ginormous uncomfortable pads our grandmother’s used!” “No way! I haven’t used a pad since junior high, ewwwww, why would anyone?”
I switch products around depending on my activity, what day of the cycle it is, all sorts of different factors, she should have just looked further.
(I’m now going to have to start a thread in CS to see if anyone can tell me the name of a book which contained the line “yeah, they acted like friends but she knew there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t steal her last tampon”)
Even though I’ve now got my Mooncup (which is fantabulous) I still have a pursepack of liners and a small box of non applicator Kotex tampons in my bag.
I’d really prefer to do the Mooncup stuff in my own bathroom, and just use a tampon or liner until I got home.
TMI.
MUCH, MUCH TMI.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
SCROLL ON IF YOU’RE SQUEAMISH.
Pantyliners are something I would no longer be without, since irishfella and I are no longer using condoms. For those mornings when you have sex RIGHT before you have to leave the house.
Thank you to people like you! (No sarcasm). I used to be painfully shy about asking, but then someone did almost exactly this for me and I realized how silly it was to be shy.
I’m a retired HS teacher. For years, I had all kinds of supplies tucked away-- in my purse, in my desk, in my locker. Students occasionally whispered about an emergency, colleagues as well. I was only caught unaware the very first time I had a period, and that was traumatic enough a lesson to last me through the decades.
Nowadays, I keep a box of tampons and one of thinliners at home in each bathroom, for nieces, step-granddaughters, daughters-in-law, and friends, in case of need.
Nope, I take just what I need, maybe one for the road if I have a long trip home. I have preferences, but beggars can’t be choosers and I would be grateful for any help. Usually, if it is someone I know well, ie my sister, I will ask for something specific, like super with applicator, but when she hands me that little ob thing, I take it and use it because I do prefer ob to the sweatshirt around the waist and half an hour of removing stains from various layers of clothing.
Great plan, and for the love of Og, will you people who don’t need them, please, please, please put trash cans in your bathroom! I hate having to ‘pack it out’!
I figure if I’m in a situation with a group of women and/or girls (in a bathroom or whevever) then we all either a) will have, b) do have or c) have had periods. So while I wouldn’t go into detail, the simple fact that I need a tampon or something isn’t really horribly embarassing.
You know they market pads with wrappers that don’t really make noise. Unfortunately, I like the pads, or I’d never fund such a stupid marketing trick. I don’t care if you hear the wrapper, I’m not twelve!
I will put a whole box in my backpack and keep it there until it’s empty, then I stick another full one in again later. Why keep a full box?
TMI ALERT:
I don’t know my cycles (which is dumb for a chick, but there you go. Birth control implant’ll do that to ya), and I tend to be a heavy bleeder. I will go through the eight tampons that are in a box of ‘supers’ within a couple of days. So it’s better to have more than I need to get caught out at work, say (where I have no women on my team, and there’s no dispensers in the toilets), and have to struggle through the rest of the day after I’ve worn through one, using toilet paper to stop the flow.
And there’s really no difference at all between the ‘name brand’ tampons and the store brand. Really. They both do exactly the same job, with the same efficiency. So all the rubbish about ‘good’ tampons is crap, IMHO.
Like MoodIndigo1, I am a high school teacher. Unlike her, I am male. I still have emergency tampons available at all times in my pack, because I coach the debate team, and teenagers are notoriously erratic in their cycles. Every year, I save the day for a few debaters, from my team or from other teams. Everybody knows I carry, and no-one is shy anymore about asking for a loaner. They are also pretty good about restocking my bag if they’ve used it. Once a Boy Scout…
Ha ha, the cause of several squabbles, as those cases are apparently hard to find anymore, and I discovered that they were just about the right size for packing a couple of corona-sized cigars in your pocket so as to avoid their getting crushed. GF apparently thought this was not putting them to their best and highest use, but opinions vary.
On the TMI front, I suppose the thing that surprised me most to learn from a couple of early GFs was that they used liner-type products much (most??) of the month due to . . . er, generalized ‘secretions’ (cervical mucus, my HS biology suggests) (esp., I gather, 'round ovulation time). Nature red (or otherwwise) in tooth and claw, indeed.
I consider having a few spares in my purse to be standard operating procedure. My mom (when that was still an issue for her) always did.
But then again, I ritually carry any number of odd items in my purse “just in case”. Like duct tape. And a lighter even though I, personally, do not smoke.
