They mop our floors, bus our tables, take care of our kids and pick our apples. Illegal aliens' lives are about working hard, and in the shadows. It's a lonely existence: far from home, putting in 15 back-breaking hours a day, before returning each night to cell-like apartments they share with other undocumented workers. Sure, once in a while they might have a cerveza with their compadres.

But rarely, if ever, do they have time to cruise for sex.

Does anyone else feel badly about this? Fanny does.

I met Fanny through my friend Ramone. Ramone manages a cake shop in Brooklyn. The shop employs a number of bakers including Pablo, an undocumented worker from Honduras. Pablo is a terrifically talented baker and a tireless worker, never a second late and always working long past closing time.

When the cake shop had its Christmas party this year, Pablo took his once-a-year break for fun. After he'd had tres or cuatro Dos Equis, Fanny and her sister Deanna waltzed in. ("Waltz" might be a little generous, since the two gorgeous sisters had already had a few of their own at another party.)

By all accounts the party was a blast. But around midnight Fanny, picking at the remains of a chocolate layer cake in back of the shop, felt a hand on her shoulder.

"It was Pablo," she said. "I don't remember what he said. But we just started making out."

This wouldn't be remarkable -- after all, they were both a little rocked -- but Fanny has a very distinctive type: tall thin and pale. (She's obsessed with basketball player Dirk Nowitzki.) Pablo is, um, not that type.

"Did you enjoy it?" I asked.

"Pablo is so sweet," she said, deflecting. "And Ramone says he works incredibly hard. And he has no family here." I could see that she felt great sympathy for him. As she described it, they made out for a while, until Pablo grabbed her hand and placed it on his crotch (over his clothes). She gently clasped his hand and withdrew it.

It was hard to tell how much Fanny enjoyed the encounter. Either way it seemed like something more than alcohol was at play: not pity, rather tribute to a good man doing a job that might otherwise go undone (even in this teetering economy) -- a man removed from his family, but sending virtually every dime back to his family. Fanny was like the canteen singer entertaining our boys overseas (with more than her voice). She was like the massage therapists who "comforted" distress emergency workers at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11.

After Fanny withdrew her hand from Pablo's crotch, Pablo quietly moved over to Deanna and put the moves on her. Deanna was less sympathetic. (Mind you, her views on immigration are somewhat to the right of Tom Tancredo's.)

"Fanny was fine with it. I was not. I don't care how hard the guy works." She rejected his advances without so much as a "no, gracias."

What do you think? Do the hard and lonely lives of undocumented workers make you more inclined to sleep with them? Or does it have no effect on you either way? Are you more like Fanny or Deanna?