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Intern's Email Goof at HBO Max Inspires Hundreds to Show Support on Twitter (cbsnews.com) 62

Posted by EditorDavid from the goofy-world dept.
CBS News reports: A mysterious and puzzling email with the subject line of "Integration Test Email #1" landed in the boxes of some HBO Max subscribers on Thursday. Just hours later, the company said that the message was intended to be an empty test email, and "yes, it was the intern." The unnamed intern quickly became the new star of HBO Max on social media, as hundreds of encouraging messages poured in to reassure the intern that mistakes happen, in all phases of careers... And instead of subscribers responding with angry messages about an inconvenience, they used the opportunity to tell their own stories of work snafus...

One individual wrote about how they "once globally took down Spotify." It almost happened twice," they wrote. "...You managed to find something broken in the way integration tests are done. It's a good thing and will help improve things...."

"When I was 25 I made a PDF assigning each employee to the Muppet they reminded me of the most," another wrote. "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."
Dozens of news outlets, from the Huffington Post to media wire services, soon began covering the funny stories shared in support:
  • "Don't feel bad Integration Test Email #1 intern...when I was an intern once I accidentally powered off every device during a complicated laser experiment at MIT."
  • "In the first month of my new HR job with a major defense contractor, I sent out an email about shirt orders that included the division president and several corporate leaders. Title of email: Your Shit is in the HR Office..."

But my favorite reply of all?

"Dear intern, welcome to Systems Engineering."

Share your own thoughts and stories of support in the comments...


This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Intern's Email Goof at HBO Max Inspires Hundreds to Show Support on Twitter More

Intern's Email Goof at HBO Max Inspires Hundreds to Show Support on Twitter

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  • 20 Years (Score:3)

    by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Sunday June 20, 2021 @12:42PM (#61504206)

    In 20 years, we'll be reading a story such as this, and we'll see an encouraging response:

    "While working for HBO, I once accidentally sent an email to our subscribers that was supposed to be internal-only. It was called, 'Integration Test Email #1'. But instead of angry customer replies, I got a bunch of encouraging responses."

    Then we'll know who the intern was.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      Many years ago there was a pranker that gave out the company-wide mass-mail email address intended only for company internal use to a girl looking for an apartment.
      First mail - "I got this mail as a good mail looking for an apartment..."
      Second mail - "I'm gonna kill my brother for giving me this mail address..."

      Personally - no major mess-ups.

  • Just for clarification (Score:3)

    by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Sunday June 20, 2021 @12:43PM (#61504208)

    Most of you with HBO service need to understand a little missing context. You see, the people who let you borrow their password sometimes get email from HBO you know, cos they’re paying for it

  • Since I can't google it anymore, what is an integration test email? Asking for a friend.
    • Well put technically, it's an email that's sent during an integration test.

      • Well put technically, it's an email that's sent during an integration test.

        It could have been a test email sent during integration ... :-)

    • It is an email that is supposed to read, "Test, this is a test, this is only a test, this is not a real email." But some moron thought they'd get cute and write some creative fiction instead.

    • Integration test - ensure the parts work together (Score:5, Informative)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Sunday June 20, 2021 @01:17PM (#61504300) Journal

      Software and IT systems development typical includes two types of testing, at minimum.

      Unit tests test a particular feature in a particular functional unit, typically involving only one team. So for example unit tests of the subscriber database would ensure you can add a subscriber, list subscribers, and delete/deactivate a subscriber. Unit tests of the email server would be done by the team that runs the mail server and would test receiving mail internally, receiving it externally, delivering it internally, and delivering it externally.

      Integration tests ensure that different parts of enterprise work together properly. They frequently involve communications / cooperation between systems handled by different teams. So that would test that the marketing system can get the list of subscribers from the customer database, and that the marketing system can send email through the email server.

      So this intern would have been testing that the different systems work together properly - that system X can get all the subscriber info in the format it expects from the customer database, or that it can communicate properly with the email server to send email or whatever.

    • Since I can't google it anymore, what is an integration test email? Asking for a friend.

      Your friend already knew. If only you'd asked him, then you'd have saved yourself some embarrassment.

    • My wife asked me what the email meant when it came in the other day. I told her that it meant someone was about to get reamed by their boss and would be having a very bad weekend.

  • Well at least that was a company that knew how to keep their shit together.

  • Great lesson for all, keep things professional (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday June 20, 2021 @01:04PM (#61504258)

    This email is a lesson in how important it is to keep anything actually stored professional.

    It's easy to say "no-one will ever read a snarky comment here" or check in something laced with profanity because it had taken you longer than it should to track down the root cause of a hellish problem.

    Resist that urge though because you never know when anything ever stored digitally may surface, maybe to millions of people as this has... that email could have just as easily been something really embarrassing that would have gotten the intern fired and made a laughingstock, instead of encouraging a wide net of support as it has.

    • Ages ago we had some guys who would put rude debugging messages in the code because they thought it was funny. In an edge case scenario one of them left it out. Of course one of our customers his the edge case and a message box popped up saying something like "don't do that again you fucking idiot." The f-bomb was definitely in there. Needless to say that didn't go over well with the customer.

      • Good thing open-source is much more professional. ;-)

      • I'm surprised that made it through localization. Either that or I'm surprised debug code was shipped.

        • I'm surprised that made it through localization.

          I wonder if any localization services would give a heads up they encountered that, or if they just translate whatever you pass through without question...

          • My current work doesn't localize, but every past project it would have been reported to the team lead and/or the UX group.

            • Interesting, I never had that come up on projects I worked on where we sent out string files to localization services.

              • Well our "service" was an internal group out of Ireland, so within the same corp. - might have made the dynamic different.

                • Oh yeah, I could see an internal group would care more!

                  I was at some pretty large companies but all of them used external services, so I never had the chance to work with an in-house team on that. Seems like a great idea for any company that really has a serious international presence.

      • Needless to say that didn't go over well with the customer.

        Exactly the kind of thing I'd worry about leaving any swearing in the comments... did anyone face any real problems over that? Or did they just warn everyone not to do it again?

        I'm sure stuff like that happens more often than people think, there's a reason why we have "git blame" and not "git track" or some other more peaceful term.

      • Ages ago we had some guys who would put rude debugging messages in the code because they thought it was funny.

        What an fool.

        That's why code comments exist.

  • They already sicced the dragon on that intern.
  • Mistakes were looked at in the light of- if you never make any mistakes, chances are, you aren't really working.

  • Maybe we'll find Slashdot story repeats were because of an intern.

  • I didn't care when Apple TV users couldn't log in [slashdot.org], and I for damn sure don't care when some intern sends out a test email and a few people make jokes about it on Twitter for a day.

  • Writing to the boss about an issue in Ft Rucker and accidentally typed "Ft Fucker".

  • Not just HBO subscribers (Score:3)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Sunday June 20, 2021 @01:30PM (#61504334) Journal

    I received one of these and I am a former subscriber to HBO Now or some other service that wasn't called HBO Max.

  • Shouldn't be possible (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chuckugly ( 2030942 ) on Sunday June 20, 2021 @01:43PM (#61504368)

    The big outfits I've worked for restricted permission to send to large lists by policy. Prevents all sorts of malicious and innocent stuff just like this. That an intern has this permission is possibly the real story and lesson.

    • You have to test if that policy is set up correctly, right?

    • It shouldn't be possible to run a test like that live with customers. But did you test if that system worked? At some point in any configuration or design decision's lifecycle you need to test. As a result this will *always* be possible, one way or another.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pdboddy ( 620164 )
        Shouldn't is a funny word. :P The intern probably has access to "DEV" and "PROD", and accidentally used PROD to test something instead of DEV. :P So yeah, it is probably always a possibility.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      We have a ticketing system with multiple levels of importance, levels 3, 4 and 5 are in common use. Level 2 people get paged, and if the ticket isn't addressed quickly the pages rather quickly escalate to VP level. Level 1 and the executives get paged, it's only supposed to be used in situations where the company is losing large amounts of money quickly. There are multiple prompts attempting to alert the user what they're about to do, including one that flashes "ARE YOU SURE?"

      We had a security guard who

  • The issue here has nothing to do with the intern. I'm glad everybody got it #hugops.

    The real issue is how production data ended up in a test system.
    HBO's tweet on the incident does not show any accountability on the matter and diverting to the intern is definitely not helping.

    • You want real data, so you are sure you get the type of data that is actually used.

      Not some made up data, that will not give the error that may occur in some edge cases.

      You want to make sure that you do not get regression and something that worked before not work any more - using the test that gave the actual problem is always good to add as a test to make sure regression never happens.

      • Well, no.

        First, you don't allow test/dev systems to send email (guilty of this once) or otherwise rewrite the addresses.

        Second, did the customers agree to have their data used in a development environment? Such data should be stripped of all sensitive information - not easy, but must be done.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pdboddy ( 620164 )
          If you have to allow test systems to email, you make damned sure it's to devs and not the public or customer mailing list. :P And yeaaah, drumping regular customer data into a test environment is a massive security risk.

  • I made an email goof myself recently, where I sent out an email to all our customers about how to prepare for an upcoming root CA change to our HTTPS services, on a too technical level for most of the audience, and without applying any HTML template like all our other emails. This flooded our support with questions.

    I didn't get too concerned about it, because people from various departments saw this as a learning opportunity, where we wrote a new email together, and improved our internal documentation and p

  • At least the purported intern kept the email bland and on-point. He/she showed professionalism.

    It could have been worse, as in the case of this asshat from 2013: https://nationalpost.com/news/... [nationalpost.com]

    That went ON THE AIR.

  • Pffft (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Sunday June 20, 2021 @03:41PM (#61504610) Journal

    In a previous life working at a cancer lab, I managed to turn on a VERY expensive laser before starting the water flow...blew it all to shit and fried the tube and the power supply and most of the electronic controls.

    And in case you're wondering, yes, there was a low-flow cutout switch that was supposed to prevent this kind of oopsie, but the service technician (not me) had shorted it to keep the laser from tripping off when the water pressure would briefly drop during operation (like when someone flushed a toilet down the hall).

    I didn't get fired, but for several weeks I wished I had been...

    • Re:Pffft (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday June 20, 2021 @06:17PM (#61504890)

      We've all been there. I've shutdown an entire oil refinery before and the incident caused one of the largest units to have to go down for maintenance for 10 days. It's where I got one of the most important lessons of my life when my boss turned to me and said:
      "You're famous now. In 10 years people will remember your name. But they won't remember exactly why so this is a good career move for you."

      They were right too. You get to upper management level and they ask if they can name an engineer of specific discipline and the only names they'll remember are the ones they read in reports. I brushed it off at first, but I wonder if there's something to it. I have been presented with opportunities within that companies over my career as my peers have been passed over, and mostly opportunities by people I've barely ever if at all interacted with.

      • ...my boss turned to me and said: "You're famous now. In 10 years people will remember your name. But they won't remember exactly why so this is a good career move for you."

        My boss said to me:

        "The best way to not screw things up is to not do work. At least I know you are working."

  • Back in the early nineties I worked in an electronics store, selling PCs to home and business users. (286, 386 era).

    A tech in the repair department leant me a disk with a pixellated clip on it of a woman giving a guy a blow job. I think the clip lasted about 3 seconds. Pretty tame these days, but it was all new back then.

    At that time we had one of the latest-model colour laptops on display, a 386SX with a sticker price of AUD$12,999. Naturally, I displayed the video on that, since it had the best scr
    • And another one. In the mid-nineties I wrote a shipping label program. The courier supplied fanfold labels on carbon paper, all sequentially numbered, and the user had to enter the first number from the batch when the printing finished. The program would add the shipping label count, and ask ...

      Is the final number 'x'?

      To which the user would click Yes.

      I threw an error message in there and never thought about it again, but one day the printer jammed, the user tore off a label and continued printing,

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