Bill was a senior manager in a large telecommunications company. There was a studious air about him. He wore spectacles with thick lenses that magnified his eyes. Bald and portly, he was always well turned out – never succumbing to the invitation to dress down on Fridays – and his shoes were exceptionally highly polished. In a previous existence he had been an army officer and retained the practice of polishing his shoes with a soft cloth (never anything so rough as a brush!) and much spit and polish.

Bill had one truly alarming habit; without warning, in the middle of a conversation, he would fall silent. There were many occasions when he was talking over a project with a colleague when, suddenly, Bill would lapse into silence. This could happen at any time – in mid-sentence, when you had finished answering a question he had put to you, even when you asked him a question.

Once Bill had stopped, it was as though he had gone into suspended animation. He’d gaze at you through those big lenses with a blank expression. If he had been a character in a comic, he’d have been drawn with a stream of ‘thinks’ bubbles emanating from the top of his head. In the absence of any bubbles, it was hard for anyone to know how to interpret the sudden silence. Had something offended him? Had he lost his train of thought? Had he been asked a question that was so profound that it required deep thought? Had he been struck dumb by a stroke? One of Bill’s colleagues became very irritated with his own inability to tolerate the silences. The first few times Bill inflicted a sudden silence on him, in common with most people, he would obligingly fill the gap by making some comment. In hindsight, he always regretted this because it meant he had blurted out inconsequential, ill-advised statements just to fill the silence.

So the colleague devised a plan to survive the silences. He set himself the objective of not, under any circumstances, being the next to speak. No matter how long it took, Bill would have to break the silence, not him. The plan to survive the silence was simple (as the best plans always are); he would concentrate on counting (not sheep, but numbers!) and this, he reckoned, would give him something to do to fill the void.

He only had to implement his plan once. Bill fell silent, the colleague started counting (in his head, not out loud). He kept counting, and counting, and counting. Eventually, somewhere in the three-hundreds, Bill broke the silence by saying, ‘You’ve changed.’

The colleague told him about his plan and Bill never inflicted a silence on him again.