Oh man, I had a similar experience with the keyboard and a large Japanese company, but I just got used to it. Going back and forth between my laptop at the company dorm(!) and work was disorienting. Really liked being able to hit " without holding shift though. And I think @ was somewhere more reasonable? Too lazy to look it up right now but boy was that "fun". My memory's hazy, but I think my machine's language was set to en so at least I had normal backslashes.
