Slap Your Coworker Day Is a Joke, and It Should Stay One
Every October 23, somebody posts it in the office group chat. National Slap Your Coworker Day, sometimes stretched to National Slap Your Irritating Coworker Day, as if the extra adjective gives anyone legal cover. A few people send a laughing face. One person stares across the room at the colleague who microwaves fish at 11:45.
Nobody sensible plans to hit anybody. Yet the day returns every year, shared mostly by people who apologize when they bump into furniture. That mismatch is the interesting part, so let’s start there.
The holiday has no founder and no sponsor. It began as chain-email humor in the early 2000s, and the date wandered around for a while. A forward making the rounds in May 2005 announced it for “tomorrow.” Another post that same year put it on June 10. October 23 won out eventually, and nobody can say who took the vote.
The original email was meaner than today’s memes
It came with house rules: one slap per person per hour, and permission to hold someone down while other coworkers took their turns. Staplers counted as acceptable weapons. It even invoked Ike Turner as its patron saint, which tells you the humor was aimed at the cheap seats. What survives now is a cartoon hand and a caption, and that sanding-down is the best thing that ever happened to the holiday.
It also helps to see the day for what it is, which is satire. Satire takes a real grievance and inflates it until the grievance becomes visible. The grievance here is genuine: the colleague who replies all to a company-wide email, the one who narrates every thought as it forms. The inflation is ridiculous on purpose. Campus papers have run mock news stories about the day that read like The Purge relocated to a break room, and that’s the form at its best, because nobody finishes one of those wanting to hit anyone. They want to say a name out loud.
Some offices have gone further and turned it into an event. Slap-tennis, with a rubber chicken for a ball and a stack of printer paper for a net. Slap-grams, which are silly notes passed along instead of actual slaps. It sounds corny, and it is. But a rubber chicken is roughly the right size of response to a coworker who talks through your headphones. As far as anyone can tell, nobody has been hurt by a rubber chicken, which is more than the original rules could promise.
There is also the question of why this holiday travels so well. The calendar is crowded with invented national days, most of them about snacks, and a snack day asks nothing of you. This one asks you to admit something. Almost everyone has a person on their list, and almost everyone is on somebody else’s. That second part gets forgotten. The coworker you’d slap on the 23rd very likely has one they’d slap too, and you may be it.
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So what is the benefit, if any?
Irritation at work is close to universal, and almost nobody has a polite channel for it. You can't tell a colleague that the sound of their keyboard ruined your week. You can't put it in a performance review. The feeling goes underground and comes out as sighing. A joke holiday gives it somewhere to go. When a whole group laughs at the same minor misery, each person learns it wasn't only them, and that's a small, cheap kind of solidarity. A joke is also sometimes the first time anyone says a problem out loud, and problems that get said out loud get fixed more often than the ones people swallow. That benefit comes from the laughing, though, and the slapping would cancel it out. The research on anger is unflattering to the whole idea of blowing off steam. A review of 154 studies covering more than 10,000 people found no evidence that venting lowers anger. Hitting a punching bag or going for a furious run tends to keep the body wound up, and a wound-up body stays angry. If swinging at a bag doesn't help, swinging at Greg from accounting certainly won't.
Now the unfunny part. A slap is battery
In California, the law behind that is Penal Code 242, and it needs only unlawful force, not an injury. Other states use other names, such as offensive touching, but the shape is the same, and in many places a misdemeanor conviction can mean up to a year in jail. The person you slapped can also sue you, and if your employer ignored earlier warning signs about you, the employer can end up in that lawsuit too.
HR doesn’t need a statute to act
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Most handbooks have a hard line on physical contact, and “it was Slap Your Coworker Day” will show up in the investigation notes only as evidence of planning. Even the gentle version, a “friendly” tap on the shoulder in the spirit of the holiday, lands on a colleague who may have a bad day, a bad history, or no sense of humor about being touched. “I was joking” has never been a great legal argument.
Remote work has quietly changed the math, by the way. Nobody can slap a colleague who lives in a rectangle on a screen, so the irritation finds other exits: the pointed emoji, the “per my last email.” Those are small acts of aggression too, and unlike a slap they leave a paper trail that HR can read at leisure.
Courts do sometimes surprise people. A 2012 Ontario ruling went in favor of a worker who was fired for slapping a coworker, because he had a clean record and his employer had never trained anyone on its own no-violence rule. He collected a little over $12,000. Read that as a lesson for employers, not a plan for anyone else. It took a lawsuit, a judge, and a spotless history to get that result, and he still lost the job. Most American workers are employed at will, so the same slap there would likely end the story at the exit interview.
The real stress relief is boring, which is probably why it works. A review pooling 22 studies and more than 2,300 people found that micro-breaks of two to three minutes with light movement lowered stress and fatigue and sharpened focus. Up to two an hour were fine, and nothing suggested they cost anyone productivity. A lunchtime walk lifts afternoon mood, partly because of the exercise and partly because of whoever you walk with.
For the anger itself, the evidence points in the opposite direction from the punching bag. Slow breathing, meditation, yoga and counting to ten all lower physical arousal, and they work on anger as well as on general stress. Counting to ten is about as cheap as advice gets, and it turns out to be on the approved list.
Structural fixes get the least attention and often do the most. Noise-cancelling headphones or a desk moved two rows over remove the irritant instead of asking you to manage your reaction to it. And then there is the option that costs courage instead of money: say it to the person. "Could you take calls in the meeting room?" is a full sentence, and plenty of noisy coworkers have no idea they're doing it. If that fails, go to a manager with the specific behavior and a specific request. Boring again. Boring wins. So post the meme on the 23rd. Tell the group chat who you'd slap if the world worked that way. Then walk around the building for a few minutes, breathe like someone on a yoga mat, and come back to find Greg still chewing ice. He will be. You'll just be a little less likely to commit a misdemeanor about it.
Sources
• Dictionary.com, Pop Culture Dictionary: "National Slap Your Irritating Coworker Day"
• Days of the Year: "National Slap Your Coworker Day"
• Christian Heilmann, blog post "Slap your coworker day," May 12, 2005
• The Daily Evergreen (Washington State University), satirical piece on Slap Your Annoying Coworker Day
• Shouse Law Group: "Assaulted by a Co-Worker? How to File a Lawsuit" (California Penal Code 240 and 242, employer liability)
• OHS Insider: "Slapping Co-Worker Didn't Justify Immediate Termination" (Shakur v. Mitchell Plastics, 2012 ONSC 1008)
• Cornell Evidence-Based Living: "Feeling Stressed at Work? Take Microbreaks!"
• Association for Psychological Science: "Walking at Lunchtime Buffers Against Workplace Stress"
• Ohio State University meta-analysis on venting and anger, as covered by Newsweek and New Atlas
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