I have a similar story.
I am American, and I was travelling with a fellow American on business. We worked for a company in Troy, NY. We were installing a server for which our company made the specialized application, and the installation was in Basingstoke, England.
Rob, the guy I was travelling with, had no exposure to British culture. I had some, enough that I got the basic slang from the south, anyway. Rob was a smoker, as was Paul, who worked for our customer and was working with us in the data centre, was also a smoker.One day we were having a very bad start.
The server had just crashed -- hard -- for the fifth time that morning, and it was only 9:00. Paul was attempting to propose that it was time to take a smoke break and re-think our situation. The exact phrase he used was, "Right! (pause) Well. (pause) Want to step out and have a fag, then?"
I really wish I had a camera on me at that moment, because the look on Rob's face was pure gold.
(For our cousins across the pond, "fag" in the US = "poove" in the UK.)