Sad Day for Geocaching
As a reviewer, I often get to hear about the bad side of geocaching. Much too often. Today, I received the following email (the name of the sender has been removed to protect her privacy):
Mr. Walla --
We have decided to give up on geocaching. We got two e-mails today on the one of three caches we hid that you published after all our mistakes and the searchers could not find them and how their time and miles driven were wasted for nothing. We are going to remove all three of our caches and give up. Will you please let us know what we need to do to remove the geocaches from the website? They will be removed today from where we hid them. This is just too frustrating for us. We do not want to take people on wild-goose chases. Our GPS lists the coordinates and we post them correctly and it's just all a mess for us. Others are having no problems. We are not going to bring it up to our grandchildren again. We will only search for hidden ones of successful hiders if our grandchildren bring it up first and will probably try to talk them out of it. We have wasted a lot of time and money on this venture and we have failed. Thanks for your time and help. Sorry for all the problems.
Remember when you go for a cache that the hider may not be experienced, and there may be some mistakes. In fact, even experienced hiders make mistakes every once in a while. So please cut the cache owner some slack!
Also, when you go for a FTF, you are the one taking the risk that something may not be right with the cache. So instead of taking it out on the cache owner if the coordinates are wrong, just count to 10, remember that it is only a game, and enjoy the journey you just had!
Everyone of us has a chance to influence other geocachers by our logs and by our emails to them. Use discretion in both. Sadly, an Arkansas geocacher, by his or her action, has caused a newbie to leave the game. More sadly, the cache owner got into geocaching as an activity to do with her grandchildren, and now that activity is no longer an attractive option.
Let us all learn from this.
Chuck Walla
Geocaching.com Volunteer Cache Reviewer
"Volunteering is for suckers. Did you know that volunteers don't even get paid for the stuff they do?" -- Homer Simpson