Former Contra Costa Times movie reviewer Mary Pols (pictured) wrote this steamy essay for The New York Times about “buyout sex” — a final fling with a co-worker before accepting a buyout offer. She doesn’t identify the guy other to say that he was divorced and had been at the paper since at least 1999. Obviously this has led to all sorts of speculation at the CCTimes.

Sexy Ribbon on the Buyout Package

By MARY POLS
IN the current American workplace the threat of layoffs doesn’t just nip at your heels, it gnaws on them. So when my employer offered buyout packages some months ago, I didn’t hesitate. I’d been happily working as a reporter for 15 years, the last eight as a movie critic, but I wasn’t blind to reality. The newspaper was going to start shedding employees — a lot of them. With a buyout, I would at least get six month’s salary and a decent health care package.

What I didn’t know is that I’d also find myself the recipient of a less obvious benefit of losing one’s job: indulging in an office romance without having to worry about the postcoital workplace awkwardness and knowing glances from co-workers. It was, as I called it, “Buyout Sex,” a kind of short-term mental health insurance, though one that ultimately did extract from me a hefty co-payment. (More)

Photo credit: Benet Pols, from Pols’ Web page, where she discusses her book “Accidentally on Purpose” (June 2008, Ecco/Harper Collins), with the subtitle “A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made.”