Yesterday was just one of those days. A storm zapped one of our routers, disabling the network and leaving us limping along. Forced to rely on an email system that was less than optimal and definitely not what I was used to, I committed what I can only guess is considered the worst of all technological and public relations sins. Unbeknownst to me, my email began adding the name ROBERT after each first name greeting I typed. Worse yet, it was in bright red font with a single line through it. Something along the lines of “Dear Andrea, ROBERT,” Lovely. Just the personal, customized approach I was looking for.

Or not.

I realized what had happened when I got an almost immediate reply from someone on the West Coast, saying certainly I could “do better than this.” It was followed quickly by another from a famed marketer with the single word — “OUCH.” Only on these notes could I see how my email was being delivered, with a flaming red errors and mark outs. Ouch is right, although as I went back through my sent items folder and discovered that I’d sent out nearly 300 notes with the same mistake, I wanted to declare myself dead rather than merely wounded.

I tramped off to the dinner table, a grim expression on my face.We play a game every night at dinner, one that I invented after discovering that asking my three kids how school was that day resulted in blank stares and single word replies.Instead, we now go around the table, playing high/low, with each person sharing the best thing and the worst thing that happened to them that day.I was last.When I had reached the end of my embarrassing email snafu, my fourteen year old, who rarely thinks I do anything right, looked me straight in the eye and said, “That’s it?”She insisted that I was being ridiculous and only needed to send a brief explanation.”No one is perfect,” she huffed before disappearing once again behind her bedroom door. No one indeed.

And that is when, lo and behold, our high tech, steely cold world dissolved. I sent my apology note, praying that I would not be blasted on someone’s blog tomorrow for my mistake. Cheery note after sweet email began landing in my box. ABC was particularly kind, with several staffers there dismissing my mistake with a “no worries” reply. I felt more than loved when journalists at Time, Reuters, Good Morning America, The Wall Street Journal, Ad Age, MSNBC, CNBC, and dozens of others responded with nice notes, mostly saying how they or their colleagues have made similar mistakes. These notes outnumbered the attackers by a long shot, with 10 “no worries” for every one “how stupid are you?” ” My favorite was signed with the sender’s first name, followed by that bright red ROBERT. Gotta love him.

I must say that I felt buoyed by the fact that when presented with humanity and honest-to-goodness mistakes, even our beloved journalists, undoubtedly deluged by a rain of email every hour, stepped firmly to the plate with reassurances at hand. We’re not advocating mistakes and have certainly learned to triple check when emailing, but we couldn’t help basking in the nice people out there in cyberspace.

Our author Jack Mitchell, the bestselling author of Hug Your Customers and the just-launched Hug Your People, has been telling us for months that treating everyone you deal with in business with kindness and respect is the best kind of “hug” that exists in our sometimes impersonal world.

The media, apparently, is already well onto the idea. And I, for one, am extremely grateful.

(side note: I spent yesterday looking for a good topic to blog about. My colleague Dennis Welch, who’s an amazing singer/songwriter in his other life told me, “Great country songs usually come from trouble – maybe blog entries do too.”