Order Of Operations

For those of you who haven’t taken a math class in decades, there’s this thing called the order of operations. It’s the idea that when solving an equation made of multiple terms, you resolve certain things before other things. You do any multiplication or division before addition or subtraction because they are bulk addition (or subtraction). You do exponentiation before any of those because that’s bulk multiplication (or division). You take care of anything in parenthesis before all that (with the same systems on, of course) because mathematicians decided that’s a good idea. If you have PEMDAS knocking around your head (or BODMAS if you are from the British-speaking world, using “brackets” and “orders” instead of good ol’ American “parentheses” and “exponents”), that’s why.

You’re probably thinking, “Atreides, your normal pedagogical tone doesn’t usually tend toward the mathematical, and what the heck does any of this have to do with geocaching?” Well, yesterday, my caching daughter and I went out early to pick up an FTF on her last day here before going back to L-Town. It was a D1.5/T1.5 in a park at a mixed-use development (read in-town suburb) not far from home. I had been there several times for caches that had been placed (and subsequently archived), and my only real concern was beating other cachers to the find. We arrived at the park, walked a few hundred feet to GZ, and stood at the edge of a grove of trees. We were led to the foot of a specific tree with a giant knot hole at knee level. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy—or so I thought. We reached in the hole. There was no cache. We walked around the tree, noticed other smaller holes, and investigated them as well. Again, no cache. We looked at the other trees nearby on the off chance that it wasn’t in the obvious place I would have expected a D1.5/T1.5 to be. Still, no cache. At other times, I might have questioned my abilities, but I had found caches hidden by this newer CO before and was 98 percent sure what was going on. You see, there is an order of operations in cache placement: you hide the thing, then you submit the thing. If you don’t adhere to that, you will have times when someone goes for an FTF, and there is nothing for them to find, a situation I had encountered a few times with this CO before. I will cede there is a 1.99824 percent chance that a muggle found the cache and disposed of it before we got there, and even an infinitesimal chance that something truly bizarre happened to it like a raccoon (or, as I call them, trash panda) carried it off. Still, I think both of those are far less likely. And if my math seems suspect to you, know that I did no actual math, and these numbers came fully formed out of my imagination. My point here (and I do have one) is you hide the thing and then submit the thing. Any other choice just doesn’t add up.