Template:Oubliette capsule
A negotiation oubliette is the lawyer’s equivalent of what Douglas Adams once called a “clabby” conversation:[1] one struck up by a commissionaire to appear busy while avoiding difficult work, wasting time and provoking maximum forward confusion.
Negotiation oubliettes have a cosmological quality to them; like any black hole they are impossible to see directly — they are detectable only by their signature detritus: crushed aspirations of clarity and elegance, swirling around an event horizon of nothingness like so many gossamer dreams of greatness, gurgling around a galaxy-sized plughole. We enter these space-tedium singularities often, but always unwittingly, and it is only when we scrabble desperately for a way to back out of them that we realise just what we have fallen into.