In case anyone else has this issue, I tested this keyboard at home, brought it to work and fiddled with plugging it in. At some point during this I hit some random keys i guess but after the winkey and left alt keys got switched.
pressing left alt would bring up the start menu. While messing around trying to figure it out i found that holding FN and pressing left alt would actually swap this back and forth. I think this may be useful for MAC users if they would like to replace the left alt with the command key.
Other than that I ordered black friday, got my keyboard on 1/16/19 and so far so good.