Cursed Jobs, Cursed Locations, and plain ol' bad luck (was RE: Why does Snape...

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 148798

Zgirnius wrote:
>
<SNIP> 
> 
> Actually, the true number is on the order of 35-40 years. If you 
buy 
> the Lexicon timeline, <SNIP> 
> And this is in a school where we see remarkably long tenures by 
> teachers in other fields. This is *exceedingly* unlikely to occur 
by 
> chance. (OK, I may be more likely to see this than JKR 
but still. 
> We're talking win-the-powerball odds here.)
>  


Okay, first of all let me say that IF I were to bet (and I'm not a 
betting man, so I wouldn't, but if I were to do so) I would bet that 
the DADA position IS in fact cursed.  As you rightly point out, the 
evidence for such a curse is pretty strong, if entirely 
circumstantial.  I just wanted to point out the fact that all the 
evidence we have IS circumstantial, and that if JKR wanted to pull an 
interesting little BANG then having Voldemort say, in 
effect, "Curse?  What curse?  Do you honestly think I have time, in 
the midst of conquering the world, to put curses on schoolteaching 
jobs?" would not only be amusing but would not outright contradict 
the actual evidence we have at hand.  Like I say, I don't think it 
will happen, but it would be possible, if very implausible.

I don't really buy the Lexicon timeline, but not because of any 
mistakes in the Lexicon calculations.  It's just that given JKR's 
glaring and admitted weakness when it comes to anything having to do 
with numbers, (the ages of the various Weasley siblings, the number 
of students at Hogwarts, the size of the WW, the fact that 1 
September always seems to come on the same day of the week) I think 
any calculations based on the idea that she has some well-worked-out 
and consistent set of numbers in mind are likely to be in error.  
Rather I suspect she has a vague idea of the timeline she wants to 
suggest and throws out statements without really bothering to 
determine whether they are in fact consistent with a set of firm 
dates and time intervals.

I also don't think that we are dealing with winning-the-lottery 
odds.  Like I say, I agree that it seems very odd that no one has 
held the job for two years consecutively over a long period of time.  
However, things like that DO happen in real life, where curses do not 
exist (or at least I don't think they exist).  I'm thinking 
particularly of the phenomenon common to every American city, the 
cursed location.  I'm not talking about haunted houses, although 
every city has those, of course.  I mean the location where no 
business ever seems to thrive, despite the fact that it seems to be a 
perfectly good business site and businesses to either side of it have 
been open for decades.  I've lived in many different cities over the 
past twenty years, and in every one I've run across boaded-up 
buildings located between and/or among well-established businesses.  
Very often a long-term resident of the city says to me "I just don't 
understand it.  It's a perfectly good location, but nothing's been in 
there more than a year or so since "X" closed up, and that was back 
in '84 or '85."  Sometimes it's been more like '74 or '75 since 
anything worked in that particular place.  And the comment is always 
something to the effect of "I guess the place must be jinxed."  
People say it jokingly, of course, but such is the way that talk of 
jinxes and curses circulates.  (And I admit that, even though no one 
will acknowledge believing in curses, you aren't likely to find 
people willing to take chances on that location, either).

By the way, for those of you who live in other countries, do you see 
similar things?  I'm guessing you probably do.  These kinds of 
implausible and improbable runs of failure and bad luck seem to be 
universal to the human experience.  They are unusual enough that 
people talk about them, and that they give rise to joking talk of 
supernatural causes.  But they are really not all THAT unusual, and 
certainly not within the beating-the-lottery category of 
improbability.

Anyway, all of that is just to say that although I agree, for 
storyline reasons if nothing else, that the DADA position probably is 
genuinely cursed, I don't think it would be wildly unbelievable for 
the whole thing just to be a long run of bad luck combined with loose 
talk.  Such improbable runs of failure and bad luck do happen in real 
life with more regularity than one might initially think.


Lupinlore