"Sir" is how some of the more veteran officers in the RUC address the head of the police Drugs Squad. "Do I look like a sir?" laughs Det Supt Judith Gillespie.
She is one of only four female officers to reach the rank, and a number of her male colleagues haven't quite tuned into that cultural shift. Hence the occasional "Sir".
"Ma'am" is what women officers at or above inspector rank are called, although she doesn't like that title either.
"My staff just call me Boss. That will do fine," she says. Her husband, who is also in the RUC, must put up with the ribbing of being dubbed "the Boss's wife."
She is conscious of the difficult challenges ahead for herself and her colleagues but is fairly confident about the future, despite the current degree of demotivation in the RUC as it haltingly makes the transformation to the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Recently, the head of the Omagh bombing investigation, Det Supt Eric Anderson, said he was retiring. The Patten report had subverted the "sterling service" of RUC officers, and as "a matter of principle I will not be serving under his new scheme of things", he told the Sunday Life newspaper.
Det Supt Gillespie understands that view. She knows particularly how those officers and families injured or bereaved as a result of the Troubles are genuinely grieved by the changes.
But she's not for quitting, and is geared to work in the new dispensation. "We have a lot of problems to overcome and I am sure there will be a degree of rancour over the next few months as we make the transition from the RUC to the new service. But we will get over that and we will get there.
"Rarely is it recognised that the RUC has throughout all the difficult times provided a normal policing service. That is not to say, of course, that we have provided a perfect policing service."
A framed certificate in Det Supt Gillespie's office records that she was best recruit of the RUC batch that passed out in 1982.
That was a year after the hunger strikes, a violent year that saw 112 deaths, and a time when any one forecasting a future workable peace and political process would have been dismissed as a fantasist.
A dodgy time for a 19-yearold north Belfast woman to join the force. Why would anybody in their right senses join the RUC at such a period? But she always knew what she wanted, even though there is no family tradition of policing.
She describes herself as "a bit of an iconoclast. I enjoy breaking the mould. The last thing I wanted was to spend my working life behind a desk shovelling papers. I like blazing my own trail."
After finishing her A-levels, she twice applied to join the RUC and was twice turned down.
To her parents' great relief she reluctantly went to Queen's University Belfast to study French and German. But then she applied a third time and, to her parents' consternation, was successful.
She immediately dropped out of college to be a police woman in a dangerous, violent society and in a very macho force.
"The early '80s were very difficult times. When you worked with a team on whose support you were depending for your life nobody wanted to cause any problems within the team. So, I put up with a lot of things then I certainly wouldn't put up with now."
Matters have improved by "light years", she says. "There is still probably a certain amount of sexual harassment within the RUC but we deal with it much better. We have identified it as a problem, and we have procedures to deal with it."
From the Protestant tradition, she grew up in the sectarian heartland of north Belfast. She knows the streets.
Recalling her schooldays, she says: "Nightly we would hear gunfire, and there would be petrol bombing and rioting. And the following morning when you walked to school you would be walking through rubble and broken bottles. You kind of just accepted that that was the way life was. But then when we moved away from there we realised that's not the way life is. Perhaps we had almost been like prisoners."
She served in York Road, Antrim Road, Andersonstown in the heart of republican west Belfast, and in the traffic branch, where she learned valuable lessons in dealing with the media. She got exposure as the RUC's representative on UTV's Crime call programme. Before taking over the Drugs Squad she was, as chief inspector, head of the child abuse and rape inquiry team.
Her superiors obviously felt she had the calibre to progress in the force, because in 1992, as an inspector, she was appointed as staff officer to the late Ken Masterson, then deputy chief constable.
This was a highly sensitive and senior secretarial and research position, providing her with a seat at the RUC's policymaking table in the exciting period directly before and after the IRA and loyalist ceasefires of 1994. A post for officers on the up. "It gave me a tremendous insight into policy-making at a strategic level."
A number of her colleagues from the Enniskillen training college died in the Troubles. She herself was fortunate to escape when a bomb planted to explode beside a police Land Rover she was driving failed to detonate in west Belfast.
She had to learn how to handle in-your-face hostility when serving as a constable in Andersonstown. Det Supt Gillespie says she regrets that because of security concerns in west Belfast police often had to be necessarily tardy in answering robbery calls. She regrets, too, the times when as a constable acting under Special Branch orders she had to go into private houses and take them apart searching for weapons or explosives.
"I always felt it was huge invasion of their privacy. We all understand why the searches had to be done. But when we did not find anything I often asked myself why are we doing this work."
She has two daughters, aged nine and six, on whom she dotes. However, balancing her home and professional lives can be a problem. "I don't know of anybody in the RUC who has retired saying, `I wish I had spent more time in the office'," she says ruefully.
Det Supt Gillespie has come up through the ranks and at 37 is well placed to move higher in the new force if she so wishes. "The job has not got stale on me," she says, adding, though, that she hasn't clearly mapped out what comes next in terms of her ambitions. "I am not very good at making strategic plans about my own career."
Policing is an interesting and exciting life, she says. It's a job she can recommend to any school-leaver, whether Catholic or Protestant. She hopes the changes will work out and that a truly representative force can be created.
"I am a born optimist. I would see the wine glass as half full. Within the police service there is a tremendous amount of talent. Regardless of what the future holds in terms of our signs and symbols, our uniform, our name, there is a policing job which has to be done."