The Little Green Snake

And we thought we had problems! :o)

Green Garden Grass snakes can be dangerous, Yes, grass
snakes,  not rattlesnakes. Did you not know? Then read on...

A couple in Sweetwater, Texas had a lot of potted plants and
during a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing in a lot of them indoors to
protect them from a possible freeze. It turns out that a little green
garden grass snake was hidden in one of the plants and when it had warmed up, it
slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa. She let out a very
loud scream.

The husband (who was taking a shower at the time) ran out into the
living room stark-naked to see what the problem was. She told him
there was a snake under the sofa. He got down on the  floor on his hands and
knees to look for it.

About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him in the butt.
He thought the snake had bitten him, so he fainted. His wife thought
he had had a heart attack, so she called an ambulance.

The attendants rushed in and loaded him on the stretcher and started
carrying him out. About that time the snake came out from under the
sofa and one of the Emergency Medical Technicians saw it and dropped
her end of the stretcher. That's when the man's leg was broken and why he is
in the hospital.

The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a
neighbor man. He volunteered to capture the snake. He armed himself with a
rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the couch. Soon he decided it
was gone and told the woman, and she sat down on the sofa in relief.

But in relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt
the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted, and the snake rushed
back under the sofa. The neighbor man, seeing her laying there passed out,
tried to use CPR to revive her. The neighbor's wife, who had just returned
from shopping at the grocery store, heard the loud scream. Still carrying
her groceries, she ran next door, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's
mouth and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned
goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches.

The noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbor lying
on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed he had been
bitten by the snake. She went to the kitchen, brought back a small bottle
of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's throat.

By now, the police had arrived. They saw the unconscious man, smelled
the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred. They were
about to arrest them all, when the two women tried to explain how it
all happened over a little green snake.

An ambulance was again called and it was determined that the injury
required hospitalization. The ambulance, which took away the neighbor
and his sobbing wife. Just then the little snake crawled out from under 
the couch. One of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the
snake and hit the leg of the end table that was on one side of the sofa. The
table fell over and the lamp on it shattered and as the bulb broke, it
started a fire in the drapes. The other policeman tried to beat out the flames and
fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog, who startled, jumped
up and raced out into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and
smashed into the parked police car and set it on fire.

Meanwhile, the burning drapes had spread to the walls and the entire house
was blazing. Neighbors had called the fire department and the arriving
fire-truck had started raising his ladder as they were halfway down the
street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires and put out the
electricity and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area.

Time passed ... Both men were discharged from the hospital.
The house was re-built, the police acquired a new car, and all was right
with their world.

About a year later, they were watching TV and the weatherman announced
a cold snap for that night. The husband asked his wife if she thought they
should bring in their plants for the night.  She shot him.