Google Lost a Snake? Big Deal.

I read an article the other day that was supposedly "big news" about someone at the Google head offices (the Googleplex?) losing their pet ball python and the ensuing behaviors of the Google workers. Apparently people were avoiding dark spaces and the restrooms for fear of "running into" the snake. That made me laugh. First of all, ball pythons are pretty innocuous as far as snakes go; not venomous, not aggressive and definitely not fast (unless they are eating). We have several ball pythons that are our snakes of choice to use for children's programming because they are so easy to handle. And yes, we have "lost" them a time or two. But unlike at Google, animals disappearing out of their cages is kind of a common occurence here. It isn't unusual for someone to come into my office and say...um...so and so isn't in their cage. Then we have to go on a search. Sometimes it's a snake, sometimes it's Buddy, the groundhog, sometimes it's Bernice, our African-spurred Tortoise. I think even once our former Naturalist left a container of leeches open on her desk and they, of course, got out, and were crawling down the desk and all over the office floor... Tanglewood is a fun place to work partly because of stuff like that. And we certianly can't avoid going to the bathroom when something is "loose" because we'd be bursting at least a few days a month. We never find the snakes in the bathrooms anyways.