***
Vespa liked to get to work before everyone else. As she sat at her desk with her hot cup of coffee in the quiet, early-morning calm, it was easier to forget that the office would soon be crawling with malcontent employees and racked with the incessant rancor of ringing phones. That persistent, angry buzz was one of very few things in her life now that brought back vivid memories of the socialist commune of the beehive. Vespa shuddered to remember.
Other than the unfortunate noise, Vespa pretty much liked everything about work. She was a productive, detail-oriented type of creature, and offices were generally in that constant state of rearrangement that appealed to her. She liked to carry warm, freshly printed, collated and stapled paper stacked as efficiently as honeycombs to and from the copy room. She liked clutching her coffee cup in her lap as she and Barnabus poured over the office supply budget. She liked answering phones. But she had to admit that this wasn’t her favorite of the administrative offices she had inhabited over the years. Here the air was heavy with a thick, sour tension, as if the build up of frustration and ill-will between employees had remained unscoured on the walls for years and had long since grown stale. The upper management treated their new employees like unwanted stepchildren, and their old employees like nagging, unavoidable spouses. They squabbled much like a dysfunctional family, not unlike the large one that she herself had come from.
Vespa frowned. She usually didn’t catch herself thinking of her childhood or the beehive twice in one morning, and could think of no reason she should be in such a melancholic mood. She looked around. A few other employees had started to drift into their cubicles, and they carried with them a sullen, negative energy that strained the air even more than usual. Then she remembered. Today was Sagan’s first day in the office as the official CEO, and the nervous agitation of the staff was already almost palpable. It would likely be this tense for the rest of the day, too, as they all tread on eggshells to avoid being the first to give Sagan reason to exercise his new powers.
Suddenly a rustle of whispers blew through the cubicles, “He’s here! He’s in the elevator!” Then the executive suite staff heard the ominous tone of the elevator arriving on their floor.
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