If you’ve been having a rough day at work, just be thankful you aren’t one of the employees at the Bronx Zoo stuck in this complete mess of a situation: Zoo officials are having trouble measuring this giant snake because it keeps twisting and spinning around and suffocating the zoo officials until they die.
Yikes, what a headache! It appears the surviving members of the Bronx Zoo staff are no closer to measuring the snake than they were this morning.
Earlier today, zookeepers began what was supposed to be a routine measurement of the Bronx Zoo’s reticulated python as part of the animal’s semi-annual health check, but the simple task turned into a frustrating dilemma without end: since the moment Bronx Zoo staffers brought it into the medical enclosure, the snake has not ceased to writhe and squirm and wrap itself around them repeatedly, making it seemingly impossible to assess its length. Every time the zoo workers think they’ve finally straightened out the snake, usually by having one employee sit on its tail as the others pull its upper half across the enclosure, they barely have time to measure three feet of the behemoth python before it starts jerking around and biting again. Soon the snake is flipping out one way and curling back up the other with a screaming staffer crunched up in its coil, and the staffer is forced to use his last breath to shout out how many feet he was able to measure before succumbing to the snake’s uncooperative embrace.
Though the zoo employees have tried a few alternative methods for measuring the beast, such as duct-taping a retractable tape measure to its head and sprinting as fast they can towards its tail, and seeing how many yardsticks they can get the snake to swallow in succession, the results are always the same: another dead zoo worker, and no measurement.
So far, six staffers, including both high and low level Bronx Zoo employees, have been killed in their attempt to find out how long the python is, and unfortunately, every ruler-clutching corpse the snake has crushed in its powerful coil is one less helper they have to finish the job. As if this ordeal wasn’t difficult enough, sadly, it gets worse: the snake measurement is due by the end of the day, meaning these zoo officials have absolutely no choice but to keep trying unless they’d like to get chewed out by their boss.
Oof. The Bronx Zoo really, really needs to come up with a solution for how to measure this thing without it flopping all over the place and murdering everybody.
Hopefully a guesstimate suffices, because it does not seem like these zoo workers are going to get a precise measurement of this snake anytime soon. Wish them luck in the comments—they’re definitely going to need it to finish the job.
