Template:Oubliette capsule
A naturally-occurring subterranean cavern which forms when legal eagles gather to argue about trifles. Given enough nest-feathering, posturing and guano, even the most robust transaction will tend to fray and weaken and may collapse: those discussing suddenly find themselves in a dungeon on their own making. While alarming for the commercial counterparties themselves, this is all rather fun for the negotiators who will carry on, oblivious, sometimes for months or even years. An inter-affiliate stock lending agreement fell into an oubliette in Zurich in 2014 and none of the negotiators have been heard from since though, as far as anyone “on the outside” knows, discussions are still ongoing and progressing well.
Oubliettes are often prompted by the lawyer’s equivalent of what Douglas Adams once called the “clabby” conversation:[1] one struck up by an agent 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. We detect them 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. Thus, we enter these space-tedium singularities often, but always unwittingly, and it is only when scrabbling desperately for a way back out that we realise just what we have fallen into.