The scenario made folks think of what is important during a crisis, it did for me, to demean it/belittle by characterizing it as a 'sob story' is better left unsaid, and if that means you think I'm 'whining', then so be it.
Dear Jonathan,
I could not agree more. At the risk of getting this sent to the soap box, I thought that the original post was in extremely poor taste, posted by someone who had not spent a single moment thinking about what REALLY happens in a fire -- the terror, the aching loss, the danger, the aftermath -- but instead used it as a juvenile peg on which to hang an essentially pointless question.
George's response, about how his legal experience meant that he could understand hypotheses and that no-one wanted 'sob stories', was not just in even worse taste: it was actively offensive. Yes, I've got an LL.B. too, and we've all done moots. For non lawyers who are not familiar with the term, a moot is a sort of mock trial based on actual law and hypothetical circumstances -- hence 'moot point', a question which may be interesting, and can be argued at length, but has no immediate impact on the real world.
Of course there is a spectrum of poor taste. To trump both the OP and George, I could ask, "You're a Jew being sent to Dachau. Which picture do you take with you into the gas chamber?" I suspect that ANY sane person would find this one totally unacceptable. But it's only a hypothesis, so maybe we can consider it coolly and rationally...
I fully accept that there is a lack of immediacy and of adrenaline in "What is your favourite picture?" or "Which picture means most to you?" or even "Which picture would you like to be remembered by?" but as the general tone of responses has shown, most people did not care for the way the original question was phrased.
And as Frances said, when I read this to her, if you have so little imagination that you can consider the original question dispassionately, you probably don't have enough imagination to take a picture worth saving. That doesn't apply to snapshots, obviously, but I don't think the OP was referring to snapshots.
Cheers,
R.