I was working on a construction project in the Middle East for one of the major contractors to the project a few years back (was a national infrastructure build, and was not in Qatar). The client had hired a world renowned consulting group to oversee all of the project’s major pieces. One of the consultants was a self-professed schedule optimization guru who decided to work his magic on the established build program (2 years in) to allow the client earlier access to the works than had originally been planned.

There were several reasons this was a bad idea, but they could all be summed up by saying that accelerating a program that includes close to 100 buildings and related infrastructure across 100+ square kilometers of project space, across multiple major international contractors from several different countries, raises risk of failure to what most would consider an unacceptable level. A quick note on the project management side, he was trying to compress the schedule without realistic compensation by forcing more levels of coordination between the various companies working on the site, all the while removing his consulting organization from responsibility for this new unrealistic level of coordination.

This consultant would get representatives of all of the contractors (and somehow I got added to the list of representatives) in a room, and start haranguing us on how this was supposed to work, all the while failing to notice that everybody in the room thought he was insane. Unfortunately, no one really wanted to come out and say that the emperor in this case really had no clothes, and should probably nip back into his closet.

The consultant had one incredibly annoying habit. He would make a statement, and end it with “right?” as if seeking affirmation from the group, and then answer his own question by declaring “Right.” This was done in a rapid fire sequence such that his monologues often went along the lines of: “So the sky is green, right? Right. That means that we need to issues boots to all the workers today, right? Right. The client sells boots, so you will all be purchasing boots from the client today, right? Right.” This was not an actual argument made by him, but several discussions went along those lines. This rapid fire pattern was so ingrained in him, that he would often inject these self-affirmations into his sentences, using them as some sort of oratorical comma.

After attending several meetings on this schedule optimization, I started making a tick in my notes every time he said “Right”. Didn’t make any comment, no change in expression, just made a little hash in the margin. I was doing those groups of five hashes where you do 4 lines then slash across them to indicate a group of five. About 5 minutes into the monologue, the representative from the European contingent across the table from me got what I was doing; the count was over 100 at this point. Shortly thereafter, the whole table (about 20 people) had some idea of what I was doing. “Right, right” finally caught on about 10 minutes later for no other reason than half the table was red-faced trying to hold in the laughter. After glaring at the table, and then at me for all of 10 seconds, and my puzzled question of “You were saying?”, he stormed out of the room.

Door closes, European representative leans across the table and politely asks me what the count was - room dies in laughter.

There were no more meetings on the subject from that day forward. The consultant was posted to a different project on another continent shortly thereafter.

Upon re-reading the question, I don’t know if I can truly argue that “Right?/Right.” was truly mean or rude. One could argue that his self affirming interrogatories were rude in that it forced a kind of tacit group acknowledgement that all of his statements were correct and so could not be argued.

I don’t think anyone would argue that my response was about as passive/aggressive as they come, right? Right.