Today is your day to shine, brown-nosers!
Looking for an excuse to cozy up to your superiors and put yourself in the front of the line for that promotion and/or make your coworkers look bad? Then get ready to celebrate National Boss Day. It’s actually been around for over 50 years, but is not widely celebrated for reasons you can probably figure out (it involves buying your boss a present, so there’s one factor).
The person behind this holiday did have good intentions. National Boss Day was created in 1958 by Patricia Bays Haroski, an employee at a State Farm Insurance branch in Deerfield, Illinois. She registered the holiday with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in order to not only honor all the hard-working managers out there but to also help improve relations between them and their underlings. (And probably, we’re guessing, to impress her boss.)
Haroski picked October 16 because it was her boss’s birthday, a boss who just so also happened to be her father. She was working for him at the time. As she explained later, “Reflecting on how my father had helped his white collar daughters and sons many times with their problems concerning their work, I decided to register his birthday.” In 1962, Illinois governor Otto Kerner, Jr. declared it an official state holiday.
The holiday is also observed in other countries including Australia, Ireland, and South Africa. Hallmark even sells cards to mark the occasion.