"FW: You are never going to believe this one but it is
TRUE
This is a true story. This woman went out to a local computer store
to buy a computer that her family wanted her to get so she can
e-mail them. The sales person told her that they would deliver the
computer, set it up and give her some pointers on using it, if she
had any problems later all she had to do was call their "Technical
Support" they would talk her through it over the phone or come back
to her house to find the problem. The sales person asked her if she
wanted to purchase 2 years in house warranty, the woman said
yes.
A few months went by, she was getting good sending and receiving
mail and checking the other web sites with only one call to tech
support until one day. She called tech support.
SUPPORT: Hello, technical support how can I help you
LADY: Last night my computer started making a lot of hissing noise
at me so I shut it down, this morning when I turned it on the
computer started hissing and cracking, then started smoking and a
bad smell, then nothing.
SUPPORT: I will have a technician come over first thing this
morning, just leave the computer just like it is so they can find
the problem and fix it or change it with another computer. Give me
your address and phone number and the technician will be there just
as soon as they can, in the morning.
When the technician got there, the lady showed the technician where
the computer was, said what happen to it, this is what the
technician found wrong.
Take a look at the pictures... you won't believe your
eyes!!!"
As circulated by email since 2002
"Authentic? It's tough to say with so little evidence to go on.
Although the preceding images weren't manipulated (so far as I can
tell), the same isn't necessarily true of the snake itself. Did it
really crawl into the computer under its own power, or was it
placed there as a prank? Your guess is as good as mine.
Computer CPUs generate heat and reptiles like warm places to hide,
so it's not implausible, given the opportunity and a big enough
opening to squeeze through, that a wayward snake would take refuge
in the housing of a PC. In fact, just such an occurrence was
reported last year in Gatineau, Quebec, according to a story in the
Ottawa Citizen:
A Gatineau man searching for a baseball glove in his basement
office made a scaly discovery instead. Gilles St-Jean noted that
there was a "disk eject" warning on his computer screen. He tried
to press the button to close the door holding the disk. It went in
halfway, then popped out again. It was then he saw a snake's head
protruding from the disk holder. He grabbed for the reptile, but it
disappeared into the entrails of the computer.
You will note that the details of the above report are appreciably
less dramatic than those of the email tale at hand. Absent are the
inexperienced female computer user as a main character (how wise
she was to opt for the two-year warranty!), the mysterious hiss and
crackle followed by a puff of smoke heralding a broken PC, and the
visit to (or by, depending on the version) an unsuspecting Tech
Support guy whose lot it is to uncover the grisly cause of the
malfunction. This comparative richness of narrative detail, the
fact that more than one variant of the story exists and the
up-front insistence that it's absolutely true are all hallmarks of
an urban legend, suggesting that the forwarded text may well not
provide a true account of what's going on in the photos.
As folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand points out, snakes have figured
prominently in human folklore and mythology since time immemorial,
most often as a symbol of evil or misfortune. Paradoxically, much
of the modern folklore surrounding snakes stems from the fact that
many people keep these otherwise reviled creatures as household
pets. "When these pets get loose and are found in unexpected
places, publicity about the incidents is considerable," writes
Brunvand, "and it tends to feed into legendary lore about snakes in
toilets, coiled around water pipes, in heating vents, under
floorboards, inside hollow walls, and so on."
It's high time we added computers to that list. "
Keep your ears open for that hissing sound.... 
