Growing up in the wonderland that is Edina Public Schools, I have frequently heard rumors of a man who’s job is to monitor student screens on the “Edina Open” wifi network. In 7th grade, one of my teachers told me that if I was on school wifi, someone could see my screen, and have been thinking about this mystery ever since. After receiving a tip about the location of his secret lair,  I set out on a search to locate this mystery man. I traveled down a long staircase hidden in a strangely fruity smelling janitor’s closet to a dark basement, and found a man sitting at a cluttered desk. He was wearing a dirty and tattered EHS hockey jersey and sweatpants. He was looking at what appeared to be students’ screens. One was a summer vibes Pinterest board; another was a page of barely funny memes. He scoffed.

After some small talk, I sat down for the interview and asked him, “So what exactly do you do here at EHS?”

“Not much,” he replied, “You know that teacher in 7th grade that told you someone sees when you are playing games or on Instagram? Well that was me.” As he took off his Edina baseball cap I proceeded to have a flashback to my seventh grade year but snapped out of it quickly, suppressing the traumatic memories of spending hours at a time in Aeropostale.

“What sites do you want to block?” I asked him.

“I pretty much just block the sites with the most traffic. So next up is probably something called Google Drive,” he responded. I was going to question his decision but I thought better of it.

“If you don’t mind me asking, why do you work all the way down here?”

“Well, I was at the high school for a basketball game about 10 years back, and one day I came down here looking for a bathroom, and I just never found my way out, but I found these computers and put myself to work.”

Before I could ask him more questions, three Edina police officers burst into the room and screamed, “We finally found him!” They tackled him to the ground. Slammed on the floor, he chuckled. The police later told me that he had been a criminal hacker living under the school and seeing all of our students screens. He had been wreaking havoc on EHS by stealing student passwords and even worse, writing emails to teachers from student accounts about assignments, and sending them without checking for grammatical and spelling errors.

As he was dragged away kicking and screaming I asked one of the officers, “So, does anyone monitor our screens after all?” He responded with a glimmer in his eye, “That’s just one of those questions that life won’t give an answer to.”

While the Edina hacker might have just been a fraud, a moral can be found in this story. When administration tells you to change your password, you should probably change your password.