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, one enters them unwittingly, and it is only when one mournfully looks for a way back out one realises what one has fallen into, and how impossible withdrawal will be.