Blatant Disrespect

I’ve talked about this before. If I have a pet peeve, it is this. But, having run into it more recently than I care to admit, I feel it is not unwarranted to mention it again.

We cachers mostly live and die (metaphorically speaking) by the idea that if you didn’t sign a cache’s logbook, you didn’t find it. Now, I’m not being super rigid or judgmental (at least not more than usual). Who among us hasn’t found a cache and not had a writing implement? If somebody doesn’t sign one of my low D/T caches, I don’t care. I don’t consider those as essential finds, integral to the community and a challenge presented to the yada yadas of the whatever. But, for the most part, if one is capable, one should put ink on that log because that is the agreement. Who are we if we don’t keep our agreements?

However, implicit in that agreement is that there is a log to sign and room on the log to do it. Sure, sometimes a log is missing or full. Crap happens, and we, as cachers, work around that the best we can, replacing logs or warning people to bring replacements later. These logs are like a time capsule of those who have come and gone—both spatially (the touring cacher passing through) and temporally (those who have left the life, either because of death or changes in circumstance). They matter. And that is why little rustles my proverbial jimmies like pulling out a log and finding a giant section taken up by one signature or stamp. Pulling out a nano or a micro I just found and finding that someone put their long name and message over enough spots for ten or twenty cachers to sign makes me far more livid than anything else in the geocaching world (other than pain or injury). But I’ve got to put ink on it somewhere, right?

Signing my name over someone else’s feels like the ultimate form of disrespect (except maybe for that time I found a cache with a note from the muggle who previously found it informing me he had rubbed the log baggie on his … unmentionables). As I said before, it’s a record of who has come to that cache. But if someone’s gonna be a jackhole and take up all the space, they deserve to get written on.

You might think this is silly and petty. Maybe it is. But as has been said by others, a man (or woman—I don’t mean to be gender exclusive) got to have a code.