The Ovid Office

How interns transform into office furniture

I came across a quote in the latest book by Dutch author Auke Hulst: "In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas" ; roughly translated as "I feel compelled to speak of shapes transformed into new forms." It’s a quote by the Roman poet Ovid, famous for his work "Metamorphoses," written around 8 AD. The poem chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the moment Julius Caesar is declared a God*, all wrapped up neatly in a mythico-historical package containing over 250 myths, 15 books, and precisely 11,995 lines; because apparently, Ovid had a lot of free time and zero regard for brevity in his writing. Ovid’s Metamorphoses gave us the cheerful roots of words like narcissism (self-love that ends in self-destruction), Arachne (talent punished by eternal housework), and Philomela (trauma turned into birdsong). The stories are so bleak they make Grimm’s fairy tales look like a Pixar script for toddlers. To give one example (we now narcissus right, I’ll take Daphne..

Daphne, a smart, career-focused nymph (as in: not interested in dating) is relentlessly pursued by the God Apollo, who clearly thinks “no” is just a sexy form of “maybe.” like most Gods in those days did (probably from watching to much Andrew Tate video’s)
So she does what any woman being chased by a glowing narcissist would do; asks her dad, a river god, to intervene. His solution? Turn her into a tree.
A laurel tree. Great move river God.Because nothing says “I support your independence” like stripping away your limbs and rooting you to the soil.

Apollo, witty bastard, says, “You’re mine now forever,” and goes on to wear her leaves as a crown.
This is what the ancient Romans called romance.
I call it stalking with horticultural flair.

So Metamorphoses is technically about transformation but it’s also a 15-book burn book of divine pettiness, mortal misfortune, and some very questionable landscaping decisions.
It’s what happens when the gods run HR; and all the exit interviews end in feathers, leaves, or being very, very dead.

*This "Deification of Julius Caesar" thing in the end is the fact that Caesar was murdered in 44 BC and declared a God afterwards (true story). A weird way of doing things, because it’s basically ancient Rome’s version of giving your least likable colleague Employee of the Month right after he gets fired. I mean: Imagine stabbing your boss in the back because he's too ambitious, then deciding, after a couple glasses of the empire’s cheapest wine, that maybe he wasn't so bad after all, and hey, let’s put him up there in the sky next to Jupiter.

That’s precisely what Ovid describes in the grand finale of his Metamorphoses: after nearly twelve thousand lines of shape-shifting gods, unfortunate lovers becoming trees, and basically everyone having a miserable time, Rome wraps it all up by taking a murdered politician and saying, "You know what this chaos needs? Another god."

Because that's how my brain works, I immediately thought about internships. If there's one creature that undergoes transformations more frequent and tragic than Ovid's mythological victims, it's undoubtedly your average intern.

It always starts promisingly. On their first day, interns walk in, resembling puppies that haven’t yet realized they're heading to the vet. The internship will be "a real learning opportunity", “a change to make a difference'“ or "a chance to challenge myself," they proclaim on their 5 Linkedin contacts (including their mum). Fast-forward three weeks, and you'll find yourself wondering when you accidentally ordered an ergonomic coat rack. They've become so quiet and unobtrusive they could replace your filing cabinet without anyone noticing. That’s the first metamorphosis.

Then comes the second metamorphosis: from idealist to Excel wizard. The intern who initially dreamed about "making a social impact" and "creating sustainable change" now communicates solely through spreadsheets. Pivot tables become their oxygen, and successfully executing a SUMIF formula is celebrated with the same joy as if they’ve discovered penicillin.

Even more exquisite is the third transformation: from smug student to hollowed-out husk of self-doubt. The intern who once swaggered in, declaring, “I’ve got this how hard can it be?” now flinches when the printer sighs too loudly, triple-checks the spelling of their own name, and whispers, half-joking but fully broken, “Does anyone remember what I’m for?”

They might be crying.

Or leaking dignity. Hard to tell.

But the most majestic metamorphosis (like Kafka with a badge printer) happens at the bitter end of the internship: the intern, now fluent in passive-aggression and Outlook calendar despair, sighs at the newcomers. “Ugh, can’t they show a little initiative?” they mutter, not realizing they’ve become the very Excel demon they swore to destroy.

The irony here would surely not be lost on Ovid himself. He wrote about perpetual transformations, yet interns are eternally predictable all the same. They arrive bursting with ambition, promptly vanish into the wallpaper, reemerge as spreadsheet fetishists, and ultimately end up cynically critiquing their younger clones.

So, perhaps Ovid missed his true calling; he probably would have made it as a modern HR manager. Under harsh fluorescent lighting and system ceilings, he would have witnessed the office's most repetitive magic: interns eternally transforming yet never changing at all.

I can only imagine Ovid watching this cycle unfold with his characteristic sardonic humor, sipping bad coffee from his mug with the text: I'd rather be turning people into trees” and casually turning the newest intern into a stapler just to keep things interesting.

And yet; this cursed cycle Ovid wrote about and I am using as a very generous metaphor to be sarcastic isn’t inevitable. The tragedy of the eternal intern only plays out in those offices where internships are treated like corporate purgatory: free labor wrapped in buzzwords. In companies where guidance means “don’t embarrass us,” and learning means “figure it out before lunch.” But when internships are designed with intent; when onboarding doesn’t feel like showing up in the wrong teams jersey on the football pitch, when supervisors actually supervise, when learning outcomes aren’t just decoration for the HR report.. then real metamorphosis is possible.

Not Ovidian punishment. But actual growth.
From student to skilled professional.
From observer to contributor.
From tree... back into a person.