Yeah, that would be quite the shock. If I found this guy in my wood pile, my first though would be “Oh cool!” but finding him in my kitchen drawer would be something else entirely.
Either way, I’d be inclined to keep him a couple of days and see if he can be made friendly. I have a very large enclosure for my existing snake… I wonder if he’d appreciate some company.
I’d jump out of my moccasins.
It would be a bit startling, but no worse than finding a rattlesnake under my sneakers in the living room one morning. (He was rather small, and I expect the cats got him after I threw him outside.) My chief reaction–then and now–is more along the lines of “…how?” than “EEK!”
I’m not really a fan of snakes any more than I’m afraid of them, but the snake in the pic is kind of pretty, in a shimmery, scaly sort of way.
Gorgeous! I used to have a pet black rat snake :).
That said, I think a sudden appearance in a kitchen drawer might get a bit of a startled yelp out of me :D.
I’m pretty sure that response is more reasonable and measured than what I would do. Now I am terrified to open any drawer for the rest of my life because I learned there can sometimes be a snake in there.
I just had DH check all our kitchen drawers to make sure no wildlife was present.
I’d run screaming all the way across the state, I imagine. I HATE snakes. I don’t even like looking at pictures. shudder When we were kids, my cousin used to chase me with National Geographic.
I can still hear my BIL’s shrieks echoing in my ears. He opened a closet at my mom’s house and found a black snake wrapped around the breaker box.
I may never open a drawer again. Gah.
ETA: I think I have the timeline wrong. I think my mother found the snake, then called my BIL and he, even though he knew it was there, still started shrieking. 
This thread reminds me of the stories I heard in Texas about tarantulas climbing out of their toilets. While sitting on them.
It seems they would crawl in the vent pipes during a rainstorm and, once in so far, would work themselves past the p-trap rather than go back. I doubted the story until it was told me by three different women on three different occasions. Apparently, it is a thing.
I think I told the story when it happened, but a few years ago I was raking in the fall and screamed when something small and furry scurried over my shoe. And then screamed more when my scream prompted other little heads to pop up out of the leaves to see what was going on. Still not sure if they were small moles or large voles (NH has the smallest mole and largest vole, so they’re hard to tell apart) and while they’re not typically scary, they surprised the hell out of me.
I’m glad you had enough presence of mind/poise/ courage to take a picture to share.
This reminds me of the time I went to my mom’s laundry room to move the laundry to the dryer. When I pulled open the door to the little laundry area a large possum sitting on top of the washer HISSED at me. I backed up and calmly called for backup from my husband who was in the kitchen. He grabbed the possum and took it outside. The end.
Umm, sssssssssurprisssssssse!
I’m not extraordinarily phobic about snakes. And that actually is kind of a pretty one.
But I still say we take off and nuke JcWoman’s house from orbit.
Ah, that’s probably where it came from: Whole coffee beans, spilled ground coffee, ants, three-foot-long snakes…
When I was a little kid, we were at my grandparents’ house one Sunday morning as the weather started getting cold. My grandma started turning on burners for the usual Sunday morning breakfast, and a large-ish (3.5-4 foot) black snake exited his hiding place, between the stove and flour bin. My 4’10", 90 pound grandma just scooped him up, said “Grady, get the door for me,” and put the snake on the screened porch, behind the big freezer. Washed her hands and made the biscuits. Same lady was terrified of lizards, but she figured the snake would be good for keeping mice away from the house, and she wanted him to have a warm spot for the winter.
My mother in law would have burned the house down. She quit gardening about a dozen years ago, after finding a snake in the potting shed. Hasn’t been back. (Now my father in law has turned that into his “workshop.” Quotation marks because mostly it works as a quiet spot to have a beer and some peace and solitude.)
Me, I’m not afraid of bugs or snakes or whatever. But I did once set the North American speed record for crawling backwards when I was pulling some cable in my parents’ crawlspace, and the biggest skink on the planet popped up right in front of my face.
(And our last house had very similar counters. Hated them for the same reason.)
I am not afraid of snakes particularly - I even “snake-sat” my neighbor’s three pet snakes while she was on vacation (and when the snakes escaped, I was the only person in the apartment building she could enlist to help her search for them - she was afraid the other tenants would freak out).
However, if I saw that in my kitchen drawer I’d be terrified, because I wouldn’t know if it were poisonous or not. My biggest fear would be that our cats would see it, attack it, and end up as snake food.
ETA: another vote against dark-colored counters. From a sanitation standpoint they are horrible.
+1.
A few years back, I left early to go to work. My husband stayed until the nanny arrived. She drove up, opened the garage door with her remote, CLOSED the garage door with her remote, and phoned him from outside, still in her car. Apparently there was a largeish snake - probably about the size of the one in the linked photo - that slithered out of the garage. My husband got outside just in time to see it disappear into the shrubs.
I’m not especially afraid of snakes, but had I encountered that thing in the dimly lit garage, they’d have had to peel me from the rafters and your ears would STILL be ringing from the shriek.
As it happens, we had bought a guinea pig the night before, so we told everyone that the snake had apparently heard of the new food supply and was looking for a snack.
My husband actually called around to find someone to come check the house out to see if there was an issue with it getting in, a nest of them nearby, or whatever. The cheapest of them wanted 300 dollars to even look. I told him “For 300 bucks, I’LL deal with the damn thing”.
[spoiler]Someone should have told my brother that
when he put a small snake, that we found in the cellar, down the drainseriously, this part is gross, I suggest you NOT clickand turned on the garbage disposal :eek::mad::eek::mad::mad:[/spoiler]
:: adds Texas to never-visit-under-any-circumstances list ::
Aww, your grandma sounds exactly like me and I love her!
The first thing I asked DH, who is a native to this area, was if it was a poisonous snake. I like snakes but I’m not stupid and I ain’t gonna handle an untamed venomous one. He diagnosed it as a rat snake and nonvenomous, so that made the job of removing it much easier.
But then I was worried about startling it and making it either bolt whereupon we’d never catch it, or it would bite me. Even without venom, I’m not fond of being bitten. So I had to do a little strategizing to figure out how to handle it without either one of us getting hurt. It all turned out well in the end, but in hindsight I think I could have simply and calmly grabbed it’s head and picked it up. After all, hubby had opened the drawer suddenly, stuck the thermometer in there, within inches of it, closed the drawer again and then opened the drawer and closed it a second time whereupon he shrieked, and then opened it a third time to show it to me - and through all of this the snake was unconcerned. It might have been a tame lost pet, dunno. Well, he’s a wild snake now, unless he’s found his way back into the walls.
My asp would be out the door.