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Once upon a time, I worked for a small company that had a tiny office. It was just a big room where all the developers, designers and creatives assembled, plus a couple of small ones where the owner and his secretary spent most of the time on their phone pitching to new clients or trying to get them pay overdue bills.

Italy is full of old buildings with tall roofs, hard to heat and with terrible acoustics. This was not different. The “Production” room was small and noisy. It was much like cubicle-land, but worse. Being a bunch of nerds, we devised a nerdy solution.

Whenever one deemed the room too noisy, he would cast a Cone of Silence — embodied in a physical paper cone placed in the middle of the central desk. It magically turned the noisy office room into a silent library one. Meetings, chit chat, even working together was banned for a few hours. Like any respectable spell, you couldn’t cast it in rapid succession. You could cast it once per week, then you had to wait and recharge to prevent abuse and let others finish their work.

All in all, Cone of Silence worked really well.