"That's right!"

On occassions I have to work with some of my corporate colleagues from the Hong Kong office, generally they're pretty nice people and nothing I have any big problems with, but some of the have a habit of behaving very "professional". With this I mean throwing a lot of jargon around and generally acting like a real businessman (the female colleagues never really made me annoyed because of that).

Last week I had two visitors from the Hong Kong office that had some business to do with the Japanese business so I took them under my wings during their stay. Both were Hong Kong born Chinese and the male colleage was a pretty nice guy but extremely businessmanish throwing lots of meaningless business jargon around when he had the chance (something which is bound to annoy me to some degree).

But he had this funny habit of very confidently stating "that's right!" and then firing off a confident smile. However, I think he had a habit of overdoing this, let me give you a few examples:

Salaryman: So you believe that competitor B might try to get into the Asian market?

Businessman: That's right!

Salaryman: I'm not sure in doing this will yield the return we're looking for so I think we should wait with this.

Businessman: That's right!

In the above examples I believe the statements were not completely out of place, but he also had a habit of placing this at times when perhaps other words and/or phrases would have been more suitable:

Salaryman: If you don't like raw sea urchin, maybe you shouldn't eat that.

Businessman: (looking at said sea urchin skeptically) That's right!

Salaryman: I think we're probably too tired now to go through this presentation so we'll wrap this up for today.

Businessman: (looking completely exhausted before regaining compusure briefly) That's right!

I thought this was pretty entertaining so I might start using this myself!