My last week was not my favorite. Who would have guessed that the inability to receive email would be so frustrating? I’m one to derail the lack of good conversation that has been hijacked by laptops and cell phones, U-Tube and Facebook.

I was rerouting email through an exchange server when the phone calls started coming in, indicating that people were getting messages that my email adress was non-existent. Clients and others were getting bounce back messages and couldn’t get email to me (to some extent, it was great to hear actual voices over the phone).

A whole week of inability to send or receive email. Day after day, I talked to call centers at the former web host and then the new web host. Neither could figure out the problem, and both pointed the finger at the other.

My frustration mounted. As a small business owner, it’s not a good thing to suddenly cease getting email, much less to not receive it over a full week.

For whatever weird reason, I figured out the problem seven days into the issue. I called the call center of the new web host to ask them to correct it, and had the good fortune to get Fernando on the phone.

This man had no reason to be nice to me. He may well be in a low-paying job and taking a lot of grief from customers he doesn’t know who have no problem venting their anger to someone they will never talk to again on the phone. In fact, I had spoken to someone earlier who worked in the same call center who was less than pleasant to me.

But Fernando listened, exhibited great patience with my lack of knowledge, and guided me through the final setup. There was a (seemingly small) change that I wanted to make to Outlook, and he followed up later with an email that explained how to make the change (in his own words, very clear and easy to follow).

I was stunned. But delighted. And then I thought – why should I be so grateful for someone who is kind, thoughtful, listens well and is people-friendly? Because it is so unusual!

The qualities Fernando exhibited were the ones we all want of our leaders. Pretty simple stuff.