Dear Intern: How A Mistake Turned Into A Heartfelt Twitter Trend

ACROSS AMERICA — Professionals across the country are sharing stories of blunders they have made in their careers on Twitter, addressed to “Dear Intern,” after an HBO Max intern accidentally sent a blank test email to a portion of its subscriber list.

The email was sent by the intern to subscribers on Thursday night around 9 Eastern Time with the subject line reading “Integration Test Email #1.” There was no juicy gossip or secret projects leaked in the email. The message said, “This template is used by integration tests only.”

HBO Max acknowledged the mistake on its HBOMaxHelp Twitter account, saying, “We mistakenly sent out an empty test email to a portion of our HBO Max mailing list this evening. We apologize for the inconvenience, and as the jokes pile in, yes, it was the intern. No, really. And we’re helping them through it.”

The blunder created a flurry of tweets as users, and big corporations, wrote encouraging notes to “Dear Intern,” and made jokes. One user, Aubry Andrews, tweeted, “Dear Intern, By sending out Integration Test Email #1 (It passed btw) might be the best marketing that @hbomax has ever done. Congratulations! Get yourself a beer, or two.”

Take a look at some more Dear Intern tweets.

Corporations Tweet To Dear Intern

“One time we forgot where we parked the Wienermobile so we got your back.” — Oscar Mayer

“Dear intern, a franchise rookie once secretly recorded his teammate admitting that he cheated on his fiancee. And the video got leaked. We all make rookie mistakes.” — StatMuse

“Dear intern, We once left up the final score graphic for an hour without realizing that the scores were wrong. We'll get through it together. xo Old Glory DC social media team” — Old Glory DC

Standout Encouraging Tweets To Dear Intern

“Dear Intern, An engineering manager once told me, ‘Experience is what you gain from wins, wisdom is what you learn from losses.’ Congratulations you just earned some wisdom! Don’t be afraid to fail. Be afraid of not growing. I’m proud of you. A Platform Engineer” — Eddie Herbert

“Dear intern, During my first year of work at @rockthevote, I accidentally sent to 1.5M people, an email saying ‘don't forget to vote in your election' with info about a VERY niche election in Florida that only had like, maybe 2K people voting in it. You got this.” — Kosoko Jackson

“Dear Intern, It's an email. At least you didn't erase the entire Community Access TV station's chyron graphics archive on accident. Signed, A Broadcast Engineer who once erased all the chyron graphics at a Community Access TV Station by accident when he was an intern.” — Mark Kewman

“Dear intern, I once globally took down Spotify. It almost happened twice. My team was awesome about it and I'm still here. You managed to find something broken in the way integration tests are done. It's a good thing and will help improve things. Good luck <3.” — Daenney

“Dear Intern, You are my hero. Thank you for reminding us there is a human side behind these massive companies. Signed, The human side of Apple” — Novall Swift

Dear Intern Tweets To Make You Laugh Out Loud

“Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+ all having the same hastily called all-hands meeting right now WHAT IS OUR ‘INTEGRATION TEST EMAIL?’ ” — Mike Royce

“The difference between HBO Go and HBO Max is that HBO Max includes every season Integration Test Email #1” — Zack Bornstein

“Dear Intern, when I was 25 I made a PDF assigning each employee to the Muppet they reminded me of the most. I meant to send it to my work friend, but I accidentally sent it to the entire company. My supervisor (Beaker) wanted to fire me, but the owners (Bert & Ernie) intervened.” — Aerin

“Dear Intern, at my first internship, they had me send a Fedex package & told me, ‘Just put bill sender.’ I wrote on the form, ‘To: Bill Sender.’ I thought it was a person, not billing instructions. They still hired me and I made a career there.” — Debbie Reed Fischer

“Dear Intern, I once auto-populated a mass vet email from @morris_animal to list the constituents as their ‘dogs name’ instead of their first name and it got the best email response ever. A mistake turned into a new marketing process when we sent mass emails.”— James Harper

Some users are demanding HBO Max does not fire the intern.

“DO NOT FIRE THE DEV INTERN WHO SENT THE INTEGRATION TEST EMAIL OR I’LL CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION!!!!!” — Vanezza

And as one user wrote, “don't worry HBO intern, we've all been there. Honestly, you should probably get a raise for making this weekend's hot meme.”

The word play in this one, from lawyer Suzanne Lovett, is just too good. She proofread a legal brief — remember that word — and used a global find and replace function. “Pro tip: don’t do that,” she tweeted. “My brief argued for the rights of ‘the panties.’ Not ‘the parties.’ All 50 pages of it.”

Read more responses to Dear Intern on HBOMaxHelp’s Twitter.