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 1black-hole they are, by design, impossible to see directly — detectable only by the signature detritus of crushed aspirations of clarity and elegance swirling around its event horizon like so many delicate dreams of greatness gurgling down a plughole — so we enter them unwittingly, and it is only when we see what we have done and scrabble desperately for a way to back out that we realise what we have fallen into, and the conceptual impossibility of any such withdrawal.