Several years ago, I supervised a team that responded to a fire drill by taking almost five minutes to assemble at the meeting point outside.
When I asked about it, I learned that one person had gone back to her desk to retrieve her purse. Another took a minute to wrap up a phone call. A third one walked outside, then walked back in to grab her coat.
It was the only time I ever yelled at them. Then I e-mailed them an excerpt from the NIST report of the Station Nightclub fire, which is one of the subjects of Chapter 8. The fire alarm didn't even go off until 41 seconds after the fire started. Roughly a minute after that, toxic smoke had reached the floor, the main entrance was blocked by a veritable logjam of bodies, and the fire department was still 2-3 minutes away. Almost no one still in the building at that point got out unscathed, if they got out at all.
A purse, a coat, a phone call are not worth your life, health, and well-being.
My public service announcement for the day is this: if you don't already, any time you go into a public building, be it a nightclub, a restaurant, a movie theater, whatever ... make it a habit to find at least two ways out so that you know where they are if need be.
And if the fire alarm goes off, run first and ask questions later.