You have to phone back in two days to find out if your sample passed the first screening. Those were two pretty tough days for me. I was just about half a step shy of being sick from anxiety.

Because you are being judged, right? The quality of your sperm is being measured, and how is the result not a direct reflection on you as a person? What if they tell me I am infertile? That would be horrible! The possibility that I might discover my visions of fatherhood are only dreams was not the point of this adventure at all! What if they tell me I fail, but refuse to tell me why? It would eat away at me. Would I have to go and pay for fertility testing just to know for sure?

Oh, it was a terrible, terrible time.

While the idea of the money had seemed like a nice little sidebar for doing what could be seen as a social good (making successful, intelligent, blond-haired, blue-eyed babies available to parents-to-be ? who would not want my blond-haired, blue-eyed sperm!?!), when it actually came down to experiencing the five days a week abstinence that would be required to be a donor, I found that the ongoing prospect of donorhood was something that I was deeply ambivalent on the subject of. Plus having to tell them every time I had a new partner and going through retesting every time was a big ding on the privacy front.

So even though I maybe did not want to do it, I was still twisted in knots with worry, because the product of my penis was being evaluated. What could be more personal?

Then I stopped worrying about the quantity of the sample I had left behind, and started worrying about the freezing process. I am not a cold weather guy. When we go on vacation, I inch carefully into the Oregon surf, freezing every moment and hating myself for subjecting me to this torture. And that is just cold ocean. How can I expect that my brave little explorers could survive a liquid nitrogen winter?

Now my brother, he wears shorts in the snow. His spermatozoa would laugh at the liquid nitrogen. ?You call that cold!?!? they would squeak, ?that?s not even cold enough to make us pull up the covers! What else you got??

After two days that stretched for three weeks, Thursday finally rolls around, and I can think of nothing else at work all day long except the call I am going to make to find out how my little guys are feeling. I am sure that I had some meetings or something, but all I remember is waiting for 1pm to roll around ? the arbitrary time I had set for myself to phone in.

Finally 1pm rolls around, and much as I would like to make this call from my desk, my coworkers are not leaving. So I skulk back to a conference room to make the phone call to discuss my semen.

It is odd. I did not feel a great disturbance in the force or anything marking the passing of my brave little troops, but I knew even as I picked up the phone that I would not be becoming an anonymous sperm donor.

They put me on hold for a long time. Finally a really nice sounding lady told me that my men did not survive the freezing and thawing process. Specifically, she said ?they didn?t like the freezing and thawing.? As if it were a matter of preference. ?So, fellas, that being frozen solid in liquid nitrogen thing, how?d you find that? Hmm... not so good, eh? Well, don?t you worry about it. We?ll tell that inconsiderate Scott not to do it again.?

A majority of donors are apparently ineligible for exactly this reason. Which is also a new bit of information. Sperm that can freeze is a minority? What kind of crazy natural selection process is that? What environmental factors prefer a genetic disposition to freezable sperm?

I thanked her politely, she said it was a shame, that I ?would have been such a nice donor?, and I hung up and wondered who was meeting in the next room and how much sound really carried between meeting spaces.

So, there you go. My only regret is that I left five perfectly good (well, three perfectly good and two quite lovely) porn magazines completely unperused. Learn by my example: one should never defer the opportunity to view naked women.