I had it all planned out.

The Saturday morning would be quiet — my daughter at work, my husband relaxing from a long week — and I could finally sit down to plow through photo edits from a slew of summer sessions.

With a family event I absolutely could not miss set for the bulk of the afternoon, this was my only time to get through a mountain of work.

And then the fire siren went off.

If it’s not noon and the fire siren goes off just once in our town, that means that the power has gone out. And despite the glowing screen in front of me, that’s exactly what had happened. The battery back-up designed to give me a few minutes to save my work ensured I could get in a few more minutes of editing, but just that — minutes.

I’d say I was annoyed, but it was more than that. Frustrated. Exhausted. Overwhelmed.

I had so much work to do, and suddenly this perfect little window I’d found amidst the chaos had been scooped up and carted away.

I kvetched and moaned.

I threw myself a pretty epic pity party.

And then I got in the car, determined to fill the hours with something useful — errands that needed to be done.

I didn’t make it very far before a local fire policewoman stopped my car.

“Tree down?” I asked. From the moment the siren went off I’d been assuming the cause of the outage was what it almost always is when you live in the middle of nowhere — wires taken down by a tree.

The answer was no.

A driver had fallen asleep at the wheel and taken out a pole less than a mile from my house.

I audibly gasped, my hand going straight to my mouth. In that moment I felt every ounce of someone else’s pain and equal amounts of shame for my own behavior. I’d been complaining about what? Some lost work? From my perfectly comfortable home on a nice Saturday? Meanwhile just down the road someone was going through one of the worst days of their life?

It was an important dose of perspective, the kind sometimes we need to remind ourselves to be more forgiving and kinder to the world at large.

The bad day we’re having? It could be worse.

The person in front of us? They could be having a rough time we don’t even know about.

The driver, fortunately, was OK. His car and the pole, on the other hand, had seen better days. Power would remain out for hours, my perfectly planned morning blown to smithereens, but once again the universe had given me exactly what I needed: A reminder to be a little kinder and a little more patient. Because you never know what else someone else is dealing with.