16
Aug
Common sense
You’d probably expect a report of my holiday and my geocaching adventures, but you have to wait for it a couple of days. I’m not in the mood.
There are mainly two reasons for this:
- my car GPSr is dead again. That the second unit in barely two weeks time. It’s time to search for a more sustainable solution and I guess the 865T isn’t one of them. Maybe more on that later.
- I’m disappointed – yes, again – on the way my caches are handled
When I was catching up after my holiday, I read that there were problems with two caches:
- Het boze oog GC1KF1Q got a DNF. The container already vanished once, so I needed to check this one again. The container was luckily still in its place, but not closed properly. The container was still in shape and could be closed properly though.
- TB & GC Hotel Afrit 24 GC1JK5Q got a couple of reports that the inventory of trackables doesn’t match the content of the cache. For some reason, people seem to have other ideas on what a TB/GC Hotel is, but my initial idea was straight forward: you take one, you bring one into the hotel. I also said that one needed to specify which trackable where involved in the trade.This seemed to be a logging condition which made the cache a mystery/puzzle cache – although I’ve seem trads with the same specs. Anyway, I published it anyway as a mystery cache. After some while, I saw two phenomena:
- people didn’t specify the trackables despite the log condition. Then comes the dilemma whether I should delete the logs or not
- one didn’t visit the cache because of its type. Some seem to ignore mystery caches whatever the ‘content’ is.
The only way to solve this problem was to remove the condition and indicating that one should put in at least one TB/GC. The result now is that one seem grab everything and leave only one trackable as a pittance for the next logger. On top, people don’t seem to log the trackables anymore either. I hope that this is a temporary problem due to the holidays. Both the trackable owner as I would be very thankful.
I know that the purposes of trackables is to move further as far and as quickly possible – although it doesn’t seem to happen with my TBs -, but the next loggers get really disappointed when they arrive with high hopes (based on the inventory) and see a huge container with only one TB/GC in it. I don’t know if this is a consequence of it, but one seem to neglect to hide the cache properly and leave it in full view. Luckily, the muggle factor is very low, but that doesn’t imply this kind of ignorance.
I’m really getting tired of filling up the cache (very) frequently with all the trackables I find and hide the cache properly.
Maybe I’m taking all this too seriously and let all things go with the flow, but I wonder if there doesn’t exist some kind of etiquette where each geocacher should be mindful of. Isn’t it normal that you leave a cache in the condition you like to find it/your next one or the state you like to have your own. Call it an attitude or common sense as far as I’m concerned.
