IT Comes to Hogwarts: Meet "The Set Up Wizard"

It’s 2016 and Hogwarts has faced that the internet has begun to infiltrate the wizarding world. So they did the sensible thing. They hired an IT guy….

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Fan Fiction has been a staple of the Potterverse ever since the books were first released. The wizarding world was not the first to have fans writing stories of their own characters existing in a fully formed fantasy universe. Star Wars and Star Trek both had older school versions of fans who wrote and swapped stories at meet ups and conventions, and I’ve even heard from even older school “punch card nerds” that there was a version of that for the Tolkien universe back in the day. But the release of the Harry Potter series coinciding with the rise of the internet, and platforms like LiveJournal, made it so that the teen-and-twenty-something-penned Fan Fiction became nearly as famous as the stories themselves.

Some Potter “fanfic,” as it’s referred to, can be every bit as good and magical as the original tales themselves. Most focus on retellings of the original Potter plotline, but a few here and there have taken the sandbox and gone and explored their own completely different corners of Wizardkind. And one recently sprang up that is starting to catch notice of mainstream publications such as The RadioTimes.

The concept: as the 21st century and internet technology becomes more and more intergrated into Muggle society, it finally begins to make inroads in wizarding society. Muggle-born students have been turning up for school with iPhones for nearly a decade at this point. As those kids graduate and introduce the world wide web, laptops and smartphones to their adult peers, especially those who go work for the Ministry, the wizarding world has begun to find ways to adapt that technology into their own society, and finally, they have told Hogwarts that they should start making this technology available for students to use.

There’s only one problem. Hogwarts doesn’t have wifi. Enter The Muggle IT Guy. Set up like a blog diary of his experiences, the Muggle IT guy goes through the culture shock of entering wizarding society for the first time as an adult, as well as the shock of dealing with it when one is of a more of a left-brained “math and problem solving bent” when the entirety of Wizardkind is like a right brained creativity id gone wild. The results are priceless. In an early entry entitled “How is 29 Knuts to a Sickle Intuitive?” he discovers that The Three Broomsticks doesn’t take debt, and Butterbeer does not get one drunk in the slightest. The next day he discovers the Room of Requirement, which he ends up renaming “The Room of False Promises.” Other questions he has include if one tips the Owls with mice when they deliver messages, if the moving staircases really improve the school, or if the school heads just have no idea how to turn them off, and where one can find a decent cup of coffee. (Turns out there’s a rule that makes it so the Room of Requirement cannot be turned into a personal Starbucks.) Also, as he learns, one should never call a Centaur a “Bronie.” And the default password everyone tries to use is *exactly* what you think it is.

The entire tumblr is worth a read, especially once he hires “Emily” a half-blood who attended Ilvermorny, and works as his assistant. All aboard the Hogwarts internal technology train!

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IT Comes to Hogwarts: Meet “The Set Up Wizard”

By Ani Bundel | Feb 23, 2016

It’s 2016 and Hogwarts has faced that the internet has begun to infiltrate the wizarding world. So they did the sensible thing. They hired an IT guy….