Worker Bees of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your stock options! And since most of those options are just about worthless following Apple's stock price debacle a few weeks back, we aren't too surprised to see more of those industrious little hive-dwelling insects decide to tempt fate and the Wrath of Steve by leaking various proprietary dollops of honey-sweet insider goodness to the Big Evil sometimes referred to as the "Mac Web." Indeed, the number of seemingly legit unsolicited reports showing up in our own mailbox describing what's going on inside the hive has definitely been increasing lately. Most of that stuff we won't even hint at, since the last thing we want to do is get anyone in trouble, but a fair chunk of it has already surfaced elsewhere, so we don't see much harm in telling you what some other people have posted.

Regular viewers will recall that Uncle Steve already amassed the workers a couple of weeks back for damage control following that scary-looking earnings warning. Well, according to rough but reasonably copious notes publicly available over at Go2Mac, Round 2 of the mass placation occurred last Friday, as Steve assembled the troops once again to put his unique brand of spin on the quarterly results reported last Wednesday. While apparently a fair percentage of the verbiage was "We Shall Prevail" pep-talk kind of stuff, there were definitely a few interesting points raised, both during Steve's main spiel and during the obligatory Q&A session that followed. Amid the noteworthy-yet-pedestrian stuff about Oracle running on Mac OS X, Apple tackling the scientific and server markets, and how the company won't let the education market "slip away," there were two nuggets in particular that piqued our interest.

First of all, Apple employees are being given more stock options; in fact, any employees without options are being given a minimum of 100 shares so that "every employee will be an owner of the company." (Because we all know how well that sort of thing worked for United Airlines.) Well, we happen to think it's a sweet gesture-- albeit sort of a cheap one, given the circumstances. In fact, if they had been meaning to do this for a while, now was definitely the time, since AAPL isn't likely to sink much lower. Food for thought for the conspiracy theorists with a "stock manipulation" bent: between Apple having another three hundred grand earmarked for a buyback of its own stock, and this new initiative to spread stock around the company like so much Monopoly money, what are the odds that the earnings "speed bump" was all just a cunning plan to make shares of AAPL more affordable to the company itself? (Partial credit will be given, so remember to show your work.)

The other juicy little tidbit involves Steve's expectations of his thousands of minions. Reportedly "he asked all the employees to work harder, even though it is coming up on the holidays." But don't get the wrong idea; he's not setting his staff to work and then slacking off for a cup of vegan egg nog. The actual quote is supposedly "I hope to see you late at night in the hallways with me." Well, Fa La La to you too, Santa Steve. Sounds like a lot of Infinite Loop denizens are going to be hoping for No-Doz under the tree this year.