How Do Magnets Work?

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve stumbled over a few flat magnet caches. The weird thing about that is less the existence of them, but rather the frequency that I’ve seen them lately. They’re not exactly all over the place to begin with, so it feels like finding so many at the same time is an incredibly minor hiccup in the universe or something.

For those of you not deeply engaged in the intricacies of the rules or history or hide styles (I still run into things I’ve never seen before from time to time, so it’s possible), once upon a time, caches could be flat magnets attached to ferrous things, usually signed on the attached side as their log. They’re a lot less common these days because HQ feels they are not in keeping with the spirit or the rules. A cache must be a log of some type inside a container of some type. Writing on the magnet, therefore, does not conform to the rules. There are still some out there, grandfathered from the olden times (like 2017), but you don’t see them that often (unless you’re me right now, apparently).

This is one of those things that I disagree with HQ about, but I understand. I don’t see a conflict if you think of the magnet as the container and the log. It’s about as abstract as considering a hot dog a sandwich or cereal as soup*. However, I think I get why they really made that choice. Where does it end? If you can write on the back of a magnet, what’s to stop you from signing a board? That seems just fine. What’s to stop you from signing a rock at ground zero? That doesn’t seem like a proper stewardship-of-the-earth-type thing. What’s to stop you from having to etch your name into an item? That seems a touch extreme. I see why they might think then that the way of flat magnets leads to anarchy. As someone who has spray-painted initials to claim a cache before, I realize there will be a few exceptions to the standard rules (I’d happily sign Graceland if it wasn’t forty-five bucks). But they must remain exceptions lest craziness result from clever people pushing envelopes. Why do we collectively have to be so smart? We’re the reason we can’t have nice things!

_{* It is the official editorial position of this periodical that cereal is not soup.}