Considering how much time we all spend at the office these days (those of us lucky enough to still be gainfully employed, anyway), dipping your pen in the company inkwell is just a matter of convenience dating: you share similar schedules, have built in references, and already have something in common. Here are our top ten tips for office nookie:

1. Don’t sleep with anyone above or below you on the corporate ladder: stick to peers to avoid potential abuses of power.
2. Make sure your company doesn’t actually have a policy banning inter-office fraternizing. If they do, we can’t in good faith recommend it — especially not in the middle of a recession.
3. Do send each occasional saucy text or IM, but don’t let it affect job performance.
4. Remember that the bigger and more corporate the company is, the more likely it is to be monitoring your communications. So get good at double entendres.
5. Don’t exchange double-entendres at the water-cooler unless you want all your co-workers to hate you.
6. Do call it “carpooling,” as in “Did you see who carpooled to work again this morning? Heh-heh.”
7. Do actually car-pool to work so that you can claim your nookie is an environmentally-friendly operation.
8. Do take long lunches at nearby cheap motels.
9. Don’t have sex in the unisex handicapped bathroom. That’s just gross.
10. Do have sex on your boss’s desk after-hours and in the supply closet that nobody visits. You’ll always regret it if you don’t.

This is our bi-weekly column in Metro; read it in print here