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I’ve been reading a whole bunch of creepy stories on a certain website recently, and they reminded me of something that happened to a colleague of mine while we were on a business trip nearly ten years ago. It’s fairly mild as ghost stories go, but this is a true story, and not an urban legend (I was there - so you won’t find it on Snopes.com. ). I thought I’d share it with you for your entertainment.

In 1998, I flew with some colleagues to a Microsoft TechEd conference being held at the Auckland Sheraton hotel. After the day’s activity and following late night “networking” we each went to our separate rooms, slightly inebriated but otherwise no worse for wear.
The hotel rooms were the type that always lock when the doors close, each having one of those electronic key cards for access. Our rooms were one or two floors above ground level.

My own night passed without incident.

The next morning, we all met up for breakfast in the restaurant downstairs. But one colleague looked a bit bemused and more than a little freaked out. I asked him what the matter was.
“I went to bed last night with the bedside lamp on,” he said, “and forgot to turn it off. But when I woke up this morning, I found that the bulb had been unscrewed and was lying on the bedside table next to the lamp…”
(Remember, we each had our own rooms, the doors were all locked, and there was no other external access. I also asked if he was the type to sleep-walk, and he said he wasn’t.)

Being a supportive chap, I then reminded him that there was an old cemetery almost directly across the road from the Sheraton, and that perhaps some neighbourly ghost had decided to help the hotel save power (if you click on the thumbnail picture above, you can see a Google Earth snapshot of the hotel with nearby cemetery). My colleague wasn’t too enthused with that idea. But then again, maybe he had simply rubbed the lamp before going to bed unawares - arousing a djinn in its modern containment vessel. It was a high-tech conference, after all.

On a more whimsical note, yesterday while Stumbling I saw an amusing cartoon depicting various famous characters as exemplars of the various moral orientations in the Dungeons & Dragons™ role-playing game universe. For the geekier among us, this is probably one of the more simplistic yet recognisable ways of describing the moral character of an individual - at least, a fictional one. There’s a good explanation of the system here, but basically your moral orientation - or “alignment” in D&D parlance - is described along two orthogonal axes. One axis indicates whether you are rules-oriented or not (”Lawful vs. Chaotic”); while the other shows whether you consider the needs of others as equally, or less important to your own needs (”Good vs. Evil”). Both axes have a “neutral” value in between the extremes.

After seeing the cartoon, and the list of fictional and real characters mapped against each possible value, I thought it would be fun to place countries along these moral axes - based on my own unbiased opinion, of course. Here we can use domestic and foreign policies of each nation as key indicators, being roughly equivalent to individual behaviour and attitudes toward others.

Lawful Good: Tibet. If I was blogging at the time of Abraham Lincoln, I might have put United States here. As it was, it was actually quite a challenge to think of an acceptable alternative. In the end I picked Tibet (pre-annexation), as a quaintly conservative yet benign country ruled with the velvet glove of theocratic Buddhism.

Neutral Good: New Zealand. Its geographic isolation may give Kiwis a false sense of security on the world stage, but the country has a generally compassionate stance in foreign policy. While not quite as progressive as Sweden, New Zealand has become less traditionally conservative and rules-oriented than some.

Chaotic Good: Sweden. OK, they may be insufferably liberal and progressive, but you have to hand it to them; Sweden manages to take the moral high ground in many global issues. Most recently they made a commitment to be oil-free within 15 years, and they were one of the first nations to grant Universal Suffrage. But to be this progressive you have to be somewhat of a rebel; so they tend to fall at the Chaotic end of the rules spectrum.

Lawful Neutral: United States. The US has a principled, written constitution. But it has suffered in recent times with a “do as I say, and not as I do” reputation. And post-9/11, even their own rule of law and cherished values are being replaced with the mundane imperative of national security.

“True” Neutral: France. France, along with Switzerland is one of the quintessential neutral countries of our time. It is self-interested, to be sure, but not to the point where self-interest excludes all else. Similarly it is also somewhat rule-based, but centuries of invasion has made France strongly individualistic, and that pretty much sums up France’s disposition toward the world.

Chaotic Neutral: Russia. The core nation of the former Soviet Union, Russia is still finding its way after the trials of glasnost and perestroika left it weakened, humiliated and lacking vision. Putin’s current government seeks glory on the international stage once again, but does not appear to be interested in following many rules other than its own few.

Lawful Evil: China. Still a stronghold of the Confucian ideals of familial duty and obedience, China is a byword for tradition, law, and authority by divine mandate. It is also the very definition of self-interest, showing that it is prepared to obtain global parity with other world powers by means fair or foul, through aggression both passive and active, while shamelessly stealing technology as diverse as Horticulture and Stealth.

Neutral Evil: Myanmar. Under an iron rule of military dictatorship, the current regime of Burma showed the world recently just how ruthless it was in repressing its own people in order to survive. Not even the orange-robed monks were safe from the brutality of one of the largest military forces in Asia.

Chaotic Evil: Zimbabwe. This alignment being almost entirely due to the regime of Robert Mugabe. Formerly a freedom fighter in the time of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, and a hero of black nationalism, he is now a despot with questionable sanity, presiding over hyperinflation, nonexistent human rights and a belligerent attitude toward any nation that dares question his withered hegemony.

So there you have it! Hopefully this will not affect my chances of getting an entry visa to some of the above countries should I do a world trip in my autumn years.