The last time I saw someone use a fire extinguisher was over at a barbeque at a friend's house. He had turned off the grill, and we had been eating at the dinner table for 5 minutes or so when I noticed huge clouds of black smoke on the deck. It turned out that the grease trap below the propane grill had caught fire and had also ignited grease inside the grill itself. The thermometer near the propane tank was pegged off the chart.

Luckily, two of the people at the dinner were firefighers. Unfortunately, they then went on to have an argument about whether the best course of action would be to 1) open the lid of the grill, allowing some of the heat to dissipate away from the propane tank and then extinguish the fire, or 2) leave the lid closed so as not to add more oxygen to the fire, and try to extinguish it from below. After a minute or so of this, a non-firefighter at the table got up, grabbed a fire extinguisher, threw open the lid and put out the fire. I'm still not sure which firefighter was right, but I'm glad the non-firefighter knew how to use the fire extinguisher.