“Dear Intern”—People Share Their Early-Career Mistakes After HBO Intern Sent Test Email To Users

Photo via @HBOMaxHelp/Twitter

June 18, 2021, 1:58 pm

A whole host of HBO customers were confused this week when they received a blank email from the company that turned out to be a simple test which was meant to remain internal but was accidentally sent out to a section of their user email list. HBO tweeted an explanation and apology that blamed an unnamed intern, but said that the company was “helping them through it,” hopefully meaning that the poor low-level employee will not be fired for their mistake.

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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.

— HBOMaxHelp (@HBOMaxHelp) June 18, 2021

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After the cute apology tweet, professionals from all walks of life started responding with their support for the hapless intern, telling their own stories of times they made mistakes early (or even late) in their careers, many starting with the phrase “Dear Intern.” Others reminded them of the very public mistakes made by workers that caused international incidents that were funny to everybody else.

This quickly caught on until “Dear Intern” was trending on Twitter.

Even the irreplaceable Monica Lewinsky, who gained fame as a renowned anti-bullying activist after recovering from her highly-publicized past, made one of her iconic self-referential jokes on the subject, assuring the HBO intern that “it gets better.”

We all hope the intern feels better, but for anyone who has ever made mistakes at work and for the all of us who inevitably will make mistakes at work, the supportive tweets are an uplifting reminder that screw-ups help us learn and to connect to one another as the flawed beings we are. Here are some of our absolute favorites, starting with the obvious:

1.

dear intern:

it gets better.

ps. don’t wear a beret for awhile, k?

— Monica Lewinsky (she/her) (@MonicaLewinsky) June 18, 2021

2.

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. https://t.co/zMKvQ6nxjj

— aerin. (@AerinChevyFord) June 18, 2021

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3.

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 ‘STAY HOME!’ Kewman (@mkewman) June 18, 2021

4.

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 (@JHarperMedia) June 18, 2021

5.

Dear intern, for the first two months of being admin we thought this was a rose emoji . So every D-Rose post had a tulip instead.

how far we’ve made it https://t.co/HkpjHNabJd

— Bulls Talk (@NBCSBulls) June 18, 2021

6.

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 (@daenney) June 18, 2021

7.

Dear Intern,

I heard someone once got their ship stuck in the Suez Canal creating a massive issue with world trade and product delivery. You’ll be fine.

— ATXMomster (@ATXmomster1) June 18, 2021

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8.

Dear intern, I once sent an email to 5k employees asking them to update their benefits but I didn’t bcc them so hundreds of ppl hit reply all and then hundreds more hit reply all to tell others not to reply all and it crashed our whole system email system. https://t.co/gE8BBjtv7v

— Jenny Lawson (@TheBloggess) June 18, 2021

9.

Dear Intern, as a young lawyer I proof read a legal brief and filed it with the court. I caught a typo and blindly used the global find and replace function. Pro tip: don’t do that. My brief argued for the rights of “the panties.” Not “the parties.” All 50 pages of it. https://t.co/PDJYMXuOlw

— Suzanne Lovett (@sdtlovett) June 18, 2021

10.

Dear Intern, as a very young copywriter I once had to write a brochure about a prescription drug that “reduces mortality in patients,” but it turns out I actually wrote that it “reduces morality in patients” and nobody caught it until 50,000 were printed.https://t.co/HrMqHIXhg0

— Eize Basa (@PonchoRebound) June 18, 2021

11.

Dear intern,

I once sent out a 1-900 sex hotline as a conference call number for the Women’s National Democratic Club, the average age of membership was about 78.

Shit happens.

— Rae Pickett (@RaeRoca) June 18, 2021

12.

Dear Intern,
I once sat a server room on fire. You’ll be fine.

Breaking things & making mistakes happens. This counts as experience btw. You discovered an issue with the integration systems, which is awesome. Also, you now have a breaking production story you can tell for life. https://t.co/jdsqCUtcr9

— Steve Ragan (@SteveD3) June 18, 2021

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13.

Dear intern, at least this (common) deployment mistake didn’t put an entire state—and possibly country—on false alert. https://t.co/DOKlRhp4OZ

— Tonya Iseminger (@tonyaiseminger) June 18, 2021

14.

Dear Intern,

I broke my boss’s windshield after I accidentally drove an electric pallet jack off of a loading dock.

That was my second day.

Everyone makes mistakes, that’s just a part of being human.

— Erin Leigh (@pukeuprainbows) June 18, 2021

15.

Dear intern… a colleague once used xxx dot com in a draft newsletter while we waited for the client to provide a real hyperlink and somehow it stuck so when the newsletter went out and you clicked the link, it took you to xxx dot com and it’s as bad as you think.

— Torrid Disorder (@redhot_mess) June 18, 2021

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*First Published: June 18, 2021, 1:58 pm