Template:Oubliette capsule

A negotiation oubliette is the lawyer’s equivalent of what Douglas Adams once called a “clabby” conversation: one struck up by a commissionaire to avoid meaningful work, waste time and provoke maximum confusion. Negotiation oubliettes have a cosmological quality to them; like any black-hole they are, by design, impossible to see directly — detectable only by their signature detritus; crushed aspirations of clarity and elegance swirling around an event horizon of nothingness like so many delicate dreams of greatness gurgling down a plughole. We enter them often, but always unwittingly, because only when we scrabble desperately for a way to back out do we realise what we have fallen into. Only then does the conceptual impossibility of such a withdrawal occur.