People often like to claim how much they love their job without realizing they can easily start to hate it as soon as a few circumstances at the workplace change. During the group case project in class, my group explored the movie Horrible Bosses Project and one character in the movie, Kurt Buckman, epitomized exactly such kind of complete change in attitude. At the beginning of the movie, Kurt claimed to be completely in love working as an accountant at Pellitt Chemicals and how his job was totally his “dream job”. Yet, his love takes a full 180 degree turnaround in one day when his affable boss Jack Pellitt dies and his despicable son Bobby takes over the company.

So what happened? Kurt’s job as an accountant certainly didn’t change, but he still suddenly started to hate his job once his boss died. The explanation behind this is that like Kurt, many people often confuse loving their workplace with loving their job. Kurt loved his job not because he really enjoyed working as an accountant, but rather he loved it because he loved the warm interactions he shared everyday with his boss Jack and the rest of his co-workers. Thus, when Bobby takes over and establishes a toxic workplace environment, Kurt immediately begins to hate his job because the intrinsic motivation behind him loving his job in the first place is gone.

Likewise, reading Alan Zhou’s blog post on how he quickly went from loving his job as a day camp leader at the Strathcona Community Centre to quickly dreading it, I see the same scenario happening. In his blog post, Alan states he originally loved his job while working in the summer because he shared a close relationship with his fellow volunteers that motivated him to go to work everyday. However, when he returned in the winter, the cohort of volunteers had changed and he no longer had the same motivation. This simple change quickly caused him to dread the exact same job he loved only a few months ago.

Cases like Kurt and Alan show that changes in only a few external factors can quickly alter a person’s perception of their job from love to hate.