office observations 5/31

People often give you bland compliments about your language ability.

Yeah, sure, I can text my friends on my cell phone. Sure, I can go to city hall and register. I can even go to the hospitol and do fine. I can even watch the news and read a newspaper, and translate reasonable well into English.

The test of anyone's language, though, is perhaps using it correctly in a business letter/email

Which I continually fail at, and always hesitate to hit that send button (or should I say 送信 button)

Example:

All of my coworkers in there emails, instead of writing there name or using a pronoun to specify themselves, they always use 下名 which means 'the name below'.

I assumed that this was common, widely used business Japanese so I started using it.

But we just had a release with NTT, in which through an email exchange I used 下名 to refer to myself. My supervisor was like 'well you certainly are picking up on office terms, but only Mitsubishi Electric uses that word; other companies don't use it very often'

Blah.