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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

Open Sesame

Now, apparently it’s pretty well established that muggle tech and magic don’t seem to work too well together. This very quickly drew disappointment from the Headmaster, who admitted with an air of defeat that he had neglected to write down or even attempted to remember his login password because he assumed he could use Alohomora to unlock his laptop. It took some pressuring from me for him to not set the password as Alohomora, simply because half the school is already using it as theirs.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is timeless… except for the fact that it’s now very clearly dated as taking place in the 1990s and 2000s, thanks to the lack of modern technology. Smart phones, texting, apps, and social media had no effect on Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s adventures, but they most certainly influence the current generation of Hogwarts students. To that end, the Headmaster has finally come to his senses and hired a Muggle IT guy named Jonathan Dart to bring Hogwarts into the digital age. The Setup Wizard, his Tumblr chronicling the merging of magic and wifi, is absolutely hilarious.

Poor Jonathan has only just learned about the wizarding world, so he’s scrambling to get adjusted to moving staircases, ghosts surprising him on the toilet, and oh hey who is letting these adolescents perform powerful spells without much supervision? Mostly he seems baffled by various wizarding customs:

How is 29 Knuts to a Sickle Intuitive?

Side note- Three Broomsticks Inn does not take debit cards, and Butterbeer does not actually get you shitfaced.

Do I Tip Them with Mice?

Please. If you need something fixed send me a text, not a bird.

But he’s also writing posts about how damn confusing Hogwarts itself is:

Multiple Accidents Waiting to Happen

Tried insisting that the logistics of the stairwell system is actually costing the school time and money, but the professors all agree that having magic moving stairs somehow improves the school’s aesthetic or something. I honestly think they just don’t know how to actually turn them off.

Room of False Promises

Second day on the job and I was given the entirety of it to take a look around and come up with some possible locations for where to set things up. After wandering around the left corridor on the seventh floor for a few laps I noticed a door left slightly ajar. Lo and behold, to my complete shock, inside was a fully functional server room. Delighted, I found the information for the wifi running out of its routers and took a trip around the castle to test the signal strength. This was going great until the signal went dead about a half hour later.

I returned to find my server room still intact and once again functional. I did my rounds again only to have the same thing happen.

Turns out the damn room is magical (of course it is) and was only acting as a server room because that’s what I desperately needed it to be. This is great until some kid walks past who desperately needs a toilet and POOF my servers disappear, the signal goes down, and a john takes their place.

Back to the drawing board.

Jonathan (and his new assistant, Ilvermorny alum Emily Vargo) are actively updating The Setup Wizard with tongue-in-cheek anecdotes, but this mini-rant from Jonathan is my personal favorite so far:

I Have the POWER

When I was first starting out in this position I had easily become the target of many pranks from the students. Did you know there is a freaking spell that glues your feet to the ground? I know.

It took all of 2 days for them to quickly realize I literally have a switch that shuts off all the wifi access to the entire school. I don’t need forbidden curses. I have more power than any witch or wizard at this school could ever possibly imagine.

Photo: Instagram/tmloree

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Natalie Zutter

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