Jenny Lao-Phillips
Living in a small place like Macao where we easily run into someone we know from time to time, we can often have conversations with someone interrupted by a third person. Whether I meet an acquaintance while hanging out with a friend, or my friend meets an acquaintance, the interruption can sometimes be quite long.
I cannot know what most people think, but I honestly find it quite annoying when someone interrupts and starts chatting away with my friend as if I was not there. And I get more annoyed with the friend who didn’t have the courtesy to introduce the intruder to me. Unfortunately, social courtesy prevents us from showing our annoyance and walking away. So we are left sitting there spacing out. That left me thinking, when facing with such a situation, should I just ignore them and continue eating (if it was during a meal), or should I interrupt them and introduce myself? Here, there are three people that need to be educated.
Firstly, the party who is greeted by a third person during a pre-occurring conversation with a friend. This is the crucial person in this kind of social interaction. When we meet another friend while dinning or conversing with someone, we should make sure that they are both introduced to each other, and avoid getting into a long conversation with this third person. This simple social rule is something we may have already been taught at home as a child, if not in primary school. But somehow, we keep forgetting it, and I often see scenes of two people deep in conversation round the street corner with a third person just standing, obviously not involved in the conversation, waiting and looking awkward.
Secondly, the intruder. We may all have the experience of interrupting someone’s date or conversation, just to greet someone we know. When it is just a ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye’, I guess we are not intruding. But when we linger, perhaps the greeting leads into a longer conversation than we expected. What should we do to not become an intruder? If the person we met did not introduce us to their friends, we should introduce ourselves and greet them too, instead of only chatting with the person we know. In this case, the other party will be included in the conversation too, whether they want to or not. At least we would not be ignoring a person sitting or standing in front of us. And according to different articles about introducing people socially, this interruption of other people’s meal or conversation should not last longer than five minutes. We don’t want to be thought of as annoying, right?
Finally, the other friend, or the victim. We all have one or two very sociable friends who seem to know everyone wherever we go. It is somehow disturbing if they keep having to stand up to shake hands and greet different people in the course of a meal, worse if each of these greetings takes 10 minutes. We will just be sitting and listening to other people’s conversation, which are often not at all interesting. So, how can we protect ourselves from being a “victim” if the friend or the intruder just ignores us? Perhaps we could signal our friend to introduce us by politely asking who their friend is, or by kicking them under the table. Hopefully either of these measures will mean that the two parties who don’t know each other will be introduced, and the intruder will be made aware of the fact that they have just interrupted a conversation. If this signaling doesn’t work, perhaps we could stand up and introduce ourselves so they cannot ignore us anymore. This often works, but may cause some embarrassment among the group.
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