This one's for the books.

I'm getting ready to sell a car that's been sitting in my yard and has not run for years. Even though I'm selling it "AS-IS," I thought that if I could get it running it would be easier to sell, so a few days ago I began by charging up the battery. The battery is too old and run down to hold a charge for long, but charging it enables the car to start, which it did, with a huge cloud of smoke. After letting things warm up, I decided to turn on the various accessories, including the air conditioner and heater. These are driven by the same blower fan, which is underneath the dash/glove compartment area, and when I first turned it on I heard some horrendous noises I can't begin to describe, but they sounded like squeals, chirps, and some thunking thudding sounds -- as if I had chopped up a colony of mice. Following this, the fan motor slowed down and started moaning and groaning (as if encountering heavy resistence), and it occurred to me that if I allowed it to keep doing that I'd burn it out, so I shut it off.

Today (three days later) I tried it again, and this time the motor would barely turn. Not only that, there was a strange, rotten smell coming out -- but not exactly the characteristic smell of dead mice. I thought it might just be burned out from sitting all that time, but as I didn't know, I figured that if I took it apart I might be able to fix it.

Dissecting the underside of the dashboard, I located the bolts that held the fan motor in place, and when I finally got it free, I saw that it was packed with the kind of stuffing that typifies rodent nests. Here's the fan with some of the stuffing I took out:

Not quite convinced that mouse nesting material alone would account for all that noise and thunking, I craned my neck underneath the dash, and was astonished to see that the front portion of a recently mutilated, decomposing snake had fallen down as a result of removing the fan and was now dangling from inside of the fan blower compartment!

I've worked on a lot of cars, but I've never seen anything like this before, so I just had to take a picture:

Apparently, the mice were living there first, and eventually the predatory snake had found its way in -- obviously to feast on the mice. And then when I turned on the fan, I literally cuisinarted the poor snake to death. I fished around in there and pulled out five pieces of the snake's body, as well as some mummified mouse remains, and as I did that, all kinds of mouse and snake droppings literally rained down all over my face.

Naturally, I feel very guilty, for I had let the car sit so long that it had ceased to be a car, and become an ecosystem.

And by cuisinarting the snake, I wreaked havoc with the ecosystem in my car, messed with the food chain, and disrupted the very balance of nature!

Please don't sic the enviro wackos on me!