'Burn the house down': Jaw-dropping classroom 'visitor' shocks mums

There’s nothing quite so Australian as finding snakes in odd places, but having one interrupt your daily cleaning schedule may be the ultimate Aussie dilemma as one woman discovered this week.

Victorian woman Leanne says she was attempting to clean a local classroom when a very slippery ‘freeloader’ threw a spanner in the works.

She looked down to discover a huge snake wrapped around the broom handle, making it impossible to move.

Amused at the hilarious sight, Leanne took to Facebook with the photo she captured of the uniquely Aussie conundrum, wondering if anyone had any hacks or tricks to circumvent this particular cleaning issue.

“I seem to be having trouble getting my floor clean today,” she hilariously wrote. “Any suggestions?”

The post quickly blew up online racking up thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, but Leanne herself says the moment was far from shocking.

Diamond python a classroom pet

Leanne tells Yahoo Lifestyle Lucy the Diamond Python is, in fact, a classroom pet in a rural Victorian high school and regularly throws her weight around when Leanne is cleaning – literally.

“She does it all the time,” Leanne says. “I've given up trying to get the floor swept when she's out, because she loves the broom. It would be alright if she helped, but she's just a freeloader.”

Leanne says she tends to stick with a time-consuming, but fail-safe workaround.

“She's very strong, and very pig-headed,” she says. “ All I could do was leave her until she got bored and wandered off.”

She says Lucy is usually in an enclosure but like everyone else self-isolating at the moment, loves her daily walk outside too much to give it up.

Leanne says Lucy is far from dangerous, the only hazard being her tendency to trip up busy women trying to clean a floor.

“Other than her tendency to wrap around my ankles, [she is] not dangerous,” she says, explaining she is used to being handled by students doing animal studies.

‘Burn the house down!’: Mums react to Lucy the snake

Mums on the Facebook group where Leanne shared the snap were at a loss as to how Leanne could deal with the issue, instead expressing their shock and confusion over the scary snap.

“I’d burn the house down!” one woman wrote.

“Wtf I would be screaming,” another agreed.

“Throw the broom away and get a new one,” one suggested. “OMG I’m sh*tting myself looking at it on my phone.”

“Nope, nope nope,” another panicked.

Not everyone was running for the hills at the sight of Lucy however, many other snake lovers shared their own hilarious scaly friend’s favourite hiding places.

One woman’s liked to settle on the coffee machine, while another preferred the pool fence.

“Omg, it's gorgeous,” was one slightly more positive reaction to the photo.

“Beautiful creature,” another agreed.

The eye-popping snap certainly divided opinions, and let’s just say we will all be approaching our cleaning items a little more cautiously in future.

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