Relations between office management and HR is, at best, cordial in real life since HR is at times kind of like detested and reviled by many people within a business organization. Anyone that’s watched The Office and seen the absolute resentment that Michael Scott has for Toby would see this and think “that’s my life” if they do in fact have an HR department at their workplace. As Nina Starner of Looper writes though, one fan theory does explain why this might be so in the popular TV show, and it’s kind of an eye-rolling explanation really. It has more to do with the fact that Michael is resentful of Toby’s chosen lifestyle, meaning his divorce, and how it relates to Michael’s past, since his own parents divorced and his mother’s ‘special friend’ Jeff took over his father’s spot. How anyone wants to think that Michael took Toby’s case and associated it with his own life is reaching, but it’s not such a long reach really. There’s plenty of precedent for such an occurrence since it does happen in real life occasionally that someone who’s been hurt or otherwise inconvenienced in life will seek to take out their frustrations on another person that is in a similar situation. In this case however Michael would be taking out his frustrations on a man that still has a great relationship with his daughter and has otherwise decided that marriage just wasn’t working. That’s petty on a level that many people have sunk to and in the case of the show wouldn’t be too far out of bounds since at times Michael is a bit too much like a child who hasn’t yet learned how to temper his more emotional-based outbursts.
Let’s be real here, HR departments in any business are bound to be thought of as great because they see to the needs of the people or hated because they appear to play favorites and are seen as, more or less, broken departments that don’t do much of anything but spin their wheels. A lot of people go into HR because they care about their fellow workers and want to make sure that life is as smooth and problem-free as it can be in the workplace, but a lot of them also become highly disillusioned when their efforts are either trashed or tossed aside in favor of a quicker and cheaper route than they would suggest when it comes to taking care of their fellow workers. The idea of an HR department is to help the workers and straighten things out when needed while keeping a reasonable sense of order in the business when it comes to the people and how they’re treated. For those that have worked in office settings however the truth is usually that HR is one of the most reviled departments since as much as they’re supposed to be there for the workers they end up being yet another cog in the machine that doesn’t work right and only makes things go slower when the average employee needs anything done. That’s a huge generalization of course since there are plenty of HR departments that work as they need to despite those that are overworked and understaffed and are in desperate need of an overhaul. One thing a person going into HR usually needs to have is people skills, coupled with the desire to actually work with and for the people around them. Once either one of these ideals begins to slip things tend to go south very quickly.
In The Office though we’re being given one of the worst-case scenarios, a manager that can’t stand the HR person since they have a host of personal issues that have yet to be resolved and therefore kind of interfere with the daily operations that should be free of any personal bias. Whether the fan theory about Michael and Toby has any truth to it or not the idea is that Michael has hated Toby for a while and has made it pretty clear throughout the length of the show. In business, a lot of people know that managers such as Michael do exist, unfortunately, and do somehow manage to stick around long enough to make the lives of their workers miserable. But when rooted in comedy and taken so over the top as Steve Carell managed to do, the effect is almost cartoonish since a lot of us might have looked at the show and stated that such a thing could never happen in real life and if it did then Michael would have lost his job a dozen times over. The sad and amusing part is that as unreal as Michael might appear in The Office there are plenty of people out there that are just as confusing as Michael Scott. Hilary Elizabeth of Screenrant has a way of explaining this in her own words.
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