Percy was brimming with satisfaction. Although his final Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test results were not out yet, all the examiners had explicitly told him he would receive very high marks.
Perhaps not as high as Professor McGonagall had scored in her day, but he would definitely rank among the best in his year, or even among all the students and other young wizards who had taken the exam across Europe that year.
Harry and the others had long known that Percy hoped to work at the Ministry of Magic after graduation-a wish shared by many top students. After all, although the Ministry's pay was average, its employees got to tell people what to do.
Of course, that was provided they did not join the Auror Office. That was far too dangerous.
As for the other departments, the work amounted to eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves at public expense, with the occasional visit to the Muggles to maintain relations and get some money.
Yes, getting money from the Muggles.
The Ministry of Magic and its counterparts in other countries all had similar jobs: managing relations with the local Muggle authorities and picking up some funding and supplies along the way.
The reason Dumbledore said the Ministry had enjoyed ample funding and been generous with its allocations in recent years-by which he might have meant the last thirty to fifty years-was that, since taking office, Fudge had been very good at getting funding from the United Kingdom's Muggle Prime Minister.
Pounds sterling were, of course, of little use to wizards, but many of the supplies they could buy were useful to them. After all, while wizards were good at transforming and modifying things, producing things out of thin air was not their strong suit.
Apart from a handful of departments with heavier