It’s really too bad it wasn’t a marketing stunt. When HBO Max sent its subscribers a puzzling email that read, in its entirety, “This template is used in integration tests only,” everyone was talking about it. Especially on Twitter. HBO tweeted from its usually very dry help account, “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.” There’s a heart emoji there, too, so subscribers can be reassured of HBO’s sincerity. And Twitter rallied around that intern.
Stories of workplace mishaps flooded the replies. Everybody has been there, it seems. One woman tweeted about accidentally tracking her menstrual cycle on a shared work calendar. Another person tweeted an admission to accidentally taking down Spotify—globally! And dozens of engineers shared dozens of mistakes. Another tweet pointed out that it could have been worse—they could have sent out a this-is-not-a-drill warning of ballistic missiles headed for Hawaii, which is a real mistake that happened in 2018. Weighing in with the final word was Monica Lewinsky, who had possibly the worst fallout from an internship ever. She tweeted this: “it gets better.” (More HBO Max stories.)