At neither camp did we run across the dreadful signs of Bed-and-Breakfast Syndrome: awkwardly choreographed group chat, punctuated by even more awkward silences.
Doing the same thing over and over again means making one dreadful signing after another and expecting things to come right.
For Key, the silence was dreadful, a sign that the fort may have fallen.
The image of older people, epitomised in the dreadful road sign, is about health and disability, but poverty is an equally defining feature, so we could talk about older people dependent on social security and those who have other sources of income.
That dreadful document signed in Nice could then be chucked into the dustbin of history.Is this serious?
Arouna Koné and Martínez's dreadful £13.5m signing Oumar Niasse remain on the books yet Koeman has preferred a winger, Gerard Deulofeu, up front in pre-season.
When BMW withdrew from Formula One at the end of 2009, unable to justify the cost after a dreadful season, Kubica signed for the Renault team and achieved some strong results, including second in Australia and third at Monaco, considered the greatest test of a driver's skill.
And there's a dreadful uniformity in those signs, whether you look at the remains of a 500-year-old dog that was found in 1953 in a peat bog in Germany or at an 800-year-old embalmed child from Peru who had been interred in a crunched and compact crouch.
Meanwhile, the data suggests a long-overdue recovery in graduate engineering and there are welcome signs that a dreadful few years for graduates in architecture, civil engineering and building might be coming to an end as employment rates rise.
The dreadful start to the negotiations was a sign of what was to follow.
