Not my personal experience but it's still funny...
In the book Virus Hunter, the guy who wrote it (C. J. Peters), tells of the time he was in South America (or was it Africa? I can't remember), and he was taking small blood samples from thousands of people. Then he would put the samples in small glass vials, but to keep the vials from breaking when they were put close to each other in the liquid nitrogen cooler, he would have to put them in some protective coating...so he used condoms. 🙂
Of course he commented that it must have seemed strange to the higher-ups that they were getting orders of thousands of condoms.