It was many years ago as I recall, when I was in college, and needed money for those ever present college expenses, when I saw an add in a local underground paper, looking for subjects to take part in fertility studies.
The money they were paying if accepted into the study seemed too good to be true, especially in my present state of poverty.
I decided to apply.
I went to the address stated in the add and entered what appeared to be a normal reception room that you might find in any medical clinic. I went up to the front desk, and told the receptionist that I was here to apply for acceptance into the fertility study they were having. "Yes," the lady said. "Please take a seat and someone will be with you presently". "There are a number of forms that need to be filled out in the meantime," she said, and handed me a folder and a pen. I sat down in the reception room and opened the folder. It seemed like a lot of boring questions. My name, age, height, weight, color of eyes, color of hair, you know the usual stuff. The also asked about my ethnicity, how many siblings I had, age of my parents, age of my grand parents so on and so forth. Along with all of the forms I had to fill out, I also had to sign a number of releases, one of which was to allow them to review my S.A.T. scores, and my academic records. What they needed those for, at the time I could not guess.
After about a half hour of filling out forms, a nurse came into the reception room and asked me to follow her, which I did. We went to a drawing room, in which the nurse asked me to sit down and to roll up my sleeve. The Nurse said that they needed to draw a blood sample for typing.
After a slight stick in the arm and a filling of a test tube I was led into another waiting room. I sat there for about another half hour perusing the various magazines when the nurse came back in and asked if I might like a cup of coffee while they were finishing up with the blood work. I said sure. In just a moment the Nurse brought me a nice hot cup of coffee in those typical Styrofoam cups. I took a sip and thought to myself, wow, I didn't need so much sugar in this.