insectoid pathetic fallacy

There are crickets living in the walls of my work building. They startle me every so often as I'm walking down otherwise featureless halls.

I suppose it's to be expected; we've been shuffling cubicles lately, so temporary overflow trailers have been appended onto the engineering wing. (The tragedy is that since a lot of our material is classified, they've blocked off all of the lovely big windows with cubicle walls. There still isn't any natural light to be found in the building.) At any rate, it stands to reason that crickets and other creatures could have gotten into the walls. Sometimes I hear birds in the bathroom vent.

But I think the crickets are the best, as evidenced by this moment in yesterday's meeting:

BOSS: ...so we'll need some volunteers. Anybody?
PEONS: [fidget] [look at ceiling tiles]
CRICKETS: *chirp* *chirp*