Snake

Ken Ritter

Saw a post on COB about a snake that got on a car and it reminded me of an incident I had almost forgotten… One time I had a “Beach Det” at Cubi Pt, and I let 2 of the guys take the Det truck up the hill to deliver something… About 45 min later they came walking back down the hill, without the truck…

After some WTF questions, turned out they were coming back when they saw a large snake crossing the road, so the decision to run over it… felt the thump from the front wheels, but nothing from the back wheels, looked back and the snake was NOT THERE… only reasonable explanation, the snake was thrown up onto the chassis of the truck, so now they basically had a hurt, and probably extremely pissed off snake, pretty much in the truck with them…

Now since the Philippines is known to have Cobras, Pythons, and other types of snakes not known to be particularly friendly to man, if not downright hazardous to your health, this could quickly escalate into something very unpleasant, so making a snap command decision, the driver ran the truck off the road, and they abandoned ship…

I called Security, we started up the hill, and there sat the truck, engine running and both doors wide open. This created an even worse scenario… with the doors open, the snake could very well have crawled inside and was just sitting there, nursing’s it’s wounds and getting even more pissed off at the human race. No one was going to go near it, so Security, in it’s infinite wisdom, determined we couldn’t just leave it sitting there running, someone had to get in and turn the engine off, or we had to mount a watch on it… Well, no one was about to volunteer to turn it off, so you can guess who I “volunteered” to stand “Port & Starboard” watches until it ran out of gas…?

It finally ran dry, engine quit, and it sat there for 3 days ’til we finally called Public Works told them the engine had quit, and we couldn’t get it to start, (not exactly a lie), and had them come tow it away and give us another truck… never did find out what happened to the snake..