Quick poll: Which of the following options would you choose if you had a giant escaped cobra living in your apartment building’s plumbing system and it was emerging from residents toilets?

a) calmly call a professional to capture it and wait patiently until the matter was resolved
b) move to a country without snakes or indoor plumbing
c) burn down the apartment building and any other nearby building that might have water pipes the cobra could escape through

Because that’s the very question residents of a building in Pretoria, South Africa are dealing with right now, after an escaped cobra was found last week sticking its horrifying hooded head out of a toilet. We came across this real life nightmare at Atlas Obscura, but somehow it just gets so much worse from that initial discovery, because the first thing they did was try option “a.” However, the giant snake apparently held on to something and couldn’t be pulled out all the way (but pulled out far enough to show just how long and terrible it is), and it then escaped back in to the pipes, where it has seemingly been hiding out ever since.

So now the residents know they have an angry giant cobra living in their toilets, and it is getting hungry. We imagine none of the building’s residents have eaten, slept, or used the bathroom since, and might never again.

So the truth is the right option in such a situation is actually option “d,” which is the one where we burn down the entire planet and move our species to a world without snakes or toilets or any memory of either.

You can literally never be too safe when you have a cobra in your toilet.

But what would you do if faced with this nightmare? Slither into the comments section below and tell us.

Images: News24