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 — 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 down a galaxy-sized plughole. We enter these space-tedium singularities 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.