Thought

[nineveh_uk]

An awful lot of the idiosyncrecies (to put it nicely) of Hogwarts can be put down to the fact that it doesn't have a school secretary. I thought it was a law of nature that a school cannot run without a cardiganed middle-aged woman in the office doing everything to keep the place on an even keel.

I blame Dumbledore. There probably was a secretary, but she resigned because he was impossible to work for and he said that there was no need to replace her. So the heads of house have to do all her work, which takes them a lot longer than it took her, which is why they have no time to check that their pupils haven't vanished/had all their stuff stolen/been lured into looking for werewolves/ been beaten to a pulp. It comes back to haunt him when the lack of that sort of knowledge leaves a gap for people like Malfoy (as a governor) and Umbridge to exploit.

Comments

[legionseagle]

I was talking over at my place about drug education at my school and I'd forgotten that the two policemen who'd given the talk (and shown exhibits with lines like, "There's enough LSD in this bottle to turn on half Lancaster" et al) went off to have tea with the school secretary afterwards - cardiganed, middle-aged as aforementioned - and they said, "What polite girls they were, so attentive, so many questions," and she said, "Have you counted all your sample bottles?"

Quite apart from anything else, a school secretary like that would have been suspicious of the Quirrell turban right away.