I found the following frighteningly realistic account here, and I have to admit it made me smile:
A screenwriter comes home to a burned down house. His sobbing and slightly-singed wife is standing outside. “What happened, honey?” the man asks.
“Oh, John, it was terrible,” she weeps. “I was cooking, the phone rang. It was your agent. Because I was on the phone, I didn’t notice the stove was on fire. It went up in second. Everything is gone. I nearly didn’t make it out of the house. Poor Fluffy is…”
“Wait, wait. Back up a minute,” The man says. “My agent called?”
As a novelist rather than a screenwriter, my reaction would have been very different; my first thought would have been, Is there enough material for two novels here?
Gary William Murning Online 