Excuse me?

Today, while in a deep (albeit mundane) conversation with a friend, a Vietnamese colleague comes up to us and goes

“Sorry to interrupt.”

Me, assuming that this person wants to speak to either one of us, starts turning my head towards her, but seeing that I am mid sentence, I don’t make eye contact with her, and continue with my sentence to my friend, just to wrap the sentence up.

“SORRY TO INTERRUPT” she yells.

That certainly stopped me in my tracks and made me look at her (picture a stunned mullet here).

I am not entirely sure what happened. I think she has come to believe that in English, when you say “sorry to interrupt” you are in fact saying “I am interrupting now, please drop everything and give me your attention.”

Unfortunately, it worked, because I was so surprised. Yet another one of those trans-lingual moments that I keep finding myself in which I choose to believe are not meant to be rude, but which I am never entirely sure of.