“Thank You Day” and the Good and Bad of Japanese Customer Service

In Japan, today is “Thank You Day.” Today is 3/9 — well, it still is here in California, anyway.

Numbers in Japanese have several possible pronunciations, so there’s a lot of wordplay based on that. Business phone numbers will often reflect the business’ service in some way by combining the pronunciations of the numbers in a way that makes a phrase relating to the business. This page has a lot of examples.

Today is “Thank You Day” in Japan because one way to pronounce the numbers 3 and 9 is “san kyu,” or “thank you.” Isn’t that cute? The above picture explains it. It’s from the Facebook page 今日は何の日, which means “What Day Is Today.” The little sign says, “いつも見てくれてありがとうございます,” which means “Thank you for always looking (at this page/site).”


I saw a listing for a freelance job editing mystery shopper narratives and decided to apply. The application requires a short writing sample about a good or bad customer service experience, so I’m going to include it right here and let my writing do double duty! I don’t know if the job will be right for my circumstances, but it won’t hurt to write a short entry, as follows:

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Malapropism Monday, Week 3

It’s a bit late here for today’s Malapropism Monday post due to today being Presidents Day — in the AP writing style there is no apostrophe — here in the US.

Today’s malapropism will be a short and quick one, because I’m tired after wrangling a couple of kids through the rain. Speaking of tiredness have you ever seen “weary” written in place of “wary”? I do all the time. People will say things such as, “I’m really weary of the new policies at work — I don’t think they’ll have a positive effect on absenteeism.” It’s not likely that you can be weary of a new policy, right? Weary means tired or fatigued. I suppose it’s possible, but not very likely.

The more apropos word in that situation would be “wary,” which means “watchful, cautious, or alert” according to Dictionary.com. It’s also possible that you could mean to say you’re “leery” of a policy, since leery means “suspicious” and is a synonym of “wary.” You could say I’m weary of seeing this error and wary whenever I see the word “weary,” and I’m leery of the misuse of these words!

Anyway, the reason my post is late today is because my family and I went to San Francisco since we all had the day off of work and school. We’ve only lived in the Bay Area for a few months, so there’s still a lot we haven’t seen here. There was rain all day long, so we didn’t spend as much time outside walking as we would have liked to, but we had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe (a family favorite anywhere in the world we can find one) followed by some walking around Pier 39 and a bit of driving tourism.

Here are a few photos from today:

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