Moving plant inside for cold weather

This was posted to the yahoo begonia forum. It's probably posted here too, but since the search is turned off I couldn't find it. Sorry if it's a repeat! But it is a hoot!

Alert! - Don't bring your plants indoors

In case you were thinking of bringing your plants in now... DON'T BRING
PLANTS INDOORS!

Garden Grass Snakes (also known as Garter Snakes) can be dangerous... Yes,
grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here's why... A couple in Sweetwater, Texas
had a lot of potted plants. During a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing a
lot of them indoors to protect them from a possible freeze.

It turned 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) ran out into the living room 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 on the behind. He thought the snake had bitten him, so he
screamed and fell over on the floor.

His wife thought he had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to
lie still, and called an ambulance. The attendants rushed in, wouldn't listen
to his protests, loaded him on the stretcher, and started carrying him out.
About that time, the snake came out from under the sofa, and the Emergency
Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That's when the
man broke his leg and why he is still 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,
who sat down on the sofa in relief.

But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt
the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back
under the sofa. The neighbor man, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to
use CPR to revive her. The neighbor's wife, who had just returned from
shopping at the grocery store, 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 and got 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 women tried to explain how it all happened over a little
green snake. The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor
and his sobbing wife.The little snake again crawled out from under the sofa.
One of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end
table. 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 out and raced
into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into
the parked police car.

Meanwhile, the burning drapes were seen by the neighbors who called the fire
department. The firemen had started raising the fire truck ladder when 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 (but they did get the house fire out).

Time passed. Both men were discharged from the hospital; the house was
repaired; the dog came home; the police acquired a new car; and all was right with
their world. A while 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.

That's when she shot him.