Moved into my new cube at PackMore today. I'm working with humans again.

Received a few admiring stares from men and women both. It's not unusual. I'm cut and pretty energetic, not to say indefatigable. I hefted my 250-pound file cabinet into a different corner. Then I repositioned my cube walls outward a few centimeters by pulling up the floor studs and shouldering the walls, all without the use of tools.

Caught the eye of the cute Information Systems staffer northeast of me. "You're in really great shape," she said. "That waist of yours doesn't exist."

I smiled, went over and stroked her some with my antennae to show my appreciation. "I'm nipped-in at all the right places," I rasped on my stridulatory organ. "Constant working out on the stair-climber at my club keeps me trim and well-segmented."

I then followed a trail of sugar grains out to the kitchenette. A couple of other workers were there at a table, discussing my sexual orientation in hushed tones. I congratulated myself on wearing clothes that kept the issue open, and chuckled at their confusion. Of course I was female, like all the workers in my family, but my standard business suit and no-nonsense grooming made this difficult to discern unless you threw your antennae around me and probed, and these people didn't seem to be into probing. They didn't even have antennae.

I was back in my cube still combing the coffee and cream from my maxillae and downloading files when another co-worker stuck his head in.

"It's Bill," he said, grasping one of my forward legs in a friendly way. "We'll be working on the new financial program together."

"I'm just here to serve the Queen," I said. "Feed her, stroke her, defend her eggs, and so forth. So if she wants me to help out with the new financial program, I consider that an imperial order and it's cool by me."

To thank Bill for this intel, I squeezed my crop and regurgitated a big drop of nutrient liquid for him to ingest. Instead, he turned quickly and ran off. Must have been a misunderstanding. Oh well, there's plenty of time for me to relearn the rules of social engagement.

A bit later, a departmental e-mail informed me that we'd be meeting with the Queen to go over a new organization table (as if castes and work assignments weren't already determined by nature!). In amusement, I cracked all the joints in the hard exoskeleton of three or four of my legs. It made one hell of a racket!

At meeting time I followed the impossible-to-miss trail of pheromones laid down by a male in my department to the conference room. "Great pheromones," I told him. "Can't miss the scent."

"Can't miss it, all right," said a pretty blonde worker as she went past us into the room, holding her nose. "I'm sitting by a window."

***