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Something Ain't Right


RocketMan

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One of my geocoins was recently grabbed by this cacher. The note from the cacher was just "Clean up time." In looking at the cacher's profile, they have logged 45 travel bugs and only 4 caches. They have a bunch of the bugs logged into their possession right now. Like I said before, Something Ain’t Right!

 

Note: This is not a discussion about whether it is a good idea to show your T-Bug tracking number on the T-Bug page. Anyone who wants to start typing in random T-Bug numbers can grab all the travel bugs they want to. It's not rocket science.

 

Rocket Man

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One of my geocoins was recently grabbed by this cacher. The note from the cacher was just "Clean up time." In looking at the cacher's profile, they have logged 45 travel bugs and only 4 caches. They have a bunch of the bugs logged into their possession right now. Like I said before, Something Ain’t Right!

 

Note: This is not a discussion about whether it is a good idea to show your T-Bug tracking number on the T-Bug page. Anyone who wants to start typing in random T-Bug numbers can grab all the travel bugs they want to. It's not rocket science.

 

Rocket Man

There's a whole thread dedicated to this guy a few months back. I'm too lazy to search for it right now, but he put a bunch of TB's in a non-existant cache in the middle of a lake and ticked a whole bunch of folks off.

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There is a travel bug "black hole" in Utah where finders with abnormally high tb find counts pass the bugs around amongst themselves for months and thereby keep the bugs from the general caching community.

 

I had a bug get caught up in that loop last September and it still has not been made available to the general caching community. My bug was IN the infamous Clean Up Crew Knack box cache on an island surrounded by thin ice and that supposedly needed a helicopter to get the container back out.

 

After several months of observing this behavior I got very mad and deleted all the find logs from the first high-count tb finder forward because I considered them to be illegitimate finds. They had control of my bug but I had power of deletion that our Creator gave us and decided to use it. Didn't even care if they threw my bug in the trash I was so mad.

 

Through this forum I subsequently found that there are many people throughout the country collecting tb finds at rates higher than their cache finds and I now see it as a legitimate geocaching activity and people are having fun with it. This game is a social experiment and it is interesting to see where it goes.

 

But in the process of deleting finds and making curt requests like "when you guys are through screwing around with my tb will you please release it…" I lumped all those finders into one entity and missed the fact that one of them actually made a good attempt to advance the bug's goal. Made amends (hopefully) with a few private apologies and offered the bug for adoption to that cacher which he accepted. Interesting to note, though, that the bug is still in that loop, stuck in Utah, and not advancing toward its new goal.

 

This Utah activity along with losing another bug in a TB Hotel where the cache owners had an "oh, well, what the heck?" attitude (not expressing any concern that 10 people just lost their tb's and this was the 2nd time it happened at that cache!) is taking the game in a direction I don't want to go. Travel bugs as a commodity took the fun out of it for me.

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I have noticed a habit of cache owners who archive their caches without retrieving the stranded travel bugs or even bothering to visit their caches before archiving them. Is this just a northwest thing? How long can they really leave a poor travel bug stranded. it might as well be in prison cause no one else is going to get it and move it on when the cache is archived.

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Note: This is not a discussion about whether it is a good idea to show your T-Bug tracking number on the T-Bug page. Anyone who wants to start typing in random T-Bug numbers can grab all the travel bugs they want to. It's not rocket science.

But not all theives are rocket scientist :lol:

A lot of things only deter people, not totally prevent them... like say door locks or not telling people your credit card numbers. Should we stop trying to 'protect' in this way?

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I just don't get why someone would do this. We love to find travel bugs, but we try to hold them for no more than 2 weeks. The whole point of a travel bug is for it to be moving, right? I agree that someone who claims 45 TBs and only 4 finds is not right. Where is the fun in holding a TB prisoner? One of our two TBs went missing in action late last summer. I emailed the person who had it and never received an answer. Just as we were about to use the duplicate tag to send a replacement out in its place, it showed up, after about 7 months missing in action. The guy did apologize for keeping it so long, which was nice. Maybe some cachers miss the point of the TB, thinking it's a collector's item, and not part of the game of caching. Who knows? :lol:

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I think some people care more about the numbers and less about the sport of caching. I have an uncle in Utah that does like to get as many TB as he can, but he also doesn't hold on to them. He moves them along as quickly as possible. He does have 417 TBs logged, but he also has 430 caches logged (over 2 years of caching). However, my dad told me the other day that my uncle was contacted by a lady who (at the time) held the record for most TBs logged. She had noticed he logged a lot of TBs and wanted him to collect all the TBs in the area to have ready on a certain day that she would be there. My uncle didn't think much of it, and gathered a few together; he even made dinner for the lady and figured he'd make a new friend through geocaching. The unfortunate thing was that when the lady arrived at his house, she wanted nothing to do with dinner, and just wanted to write down all the numbers from the bugs he had and get on her way. I couldn't believe anyone could find that fun. She had no interest in finding caches or making firneds. Her only concern was to keep her title. I don't even think there is a prize for have the most TBs logged. I wish there was a way to prevent this. :lol:

 

McWeb

P.S. I think this lady flew from somewhere in the East, but I'm not sure. I don't even know how you find out who the #1 person is.

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I think some people care more about the numbers and less about the sport of caching. I have an uncle in Utah that does like to get as many TB as he can, but he also doesn't hold on to them. He moves them along as quickly as possible. He does have 417 TBs logged, but he also has 430 caches logged (over 2 years of caching). However, my dad told me the other day that my uncle was contacted by a lady who (at the time) held the record for most TBs logged. She had noticed he logged a lot of TBs and wanted him to collect all the TBs in the area to have ready on a certain day that she would be there. My uncle didn't think much of it, and gathered a few together; he even made dinner for the lady and figured he'd make a new friend through geocaching. The unfortunate thing was that when the lady arrived at his house, she wanted nothing to do with dinner, and just wanted to write down all the numbers from the bugs he had and get on her way. I couldn't believe anyone could find that fun. She had no interest in finding caches or making firneds. Her only concern was to keep her title. I don't even think there is a prize for have the most TBs logged. I wish there was a way to prevent this. :bad:

 

McWeb

P.S. I think this lady flew from somewhere in the East, but I'm not sure. I don't even know how you find out who the #1 person is.

That's just way too obsessive....being that obsessive about this hobby wouldn't be any fun at all for me. :lol:

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She had no interest in finding caches or making firneds. Her only concern was to keep her title.

 

How sad...

 

I guess this is a commentary on life. I race sailboats, and it's nice to win. However, we don't cheat, we enjoy each and every race, win or lose, and we have never felt bad because we weren't in the top three boats. ( and yes, we have been on a regular basis.) We lost first place last Wednesday by four seconds, and what do I remember most? The really beautiful sunset breaking through the clouds, the sails of the fleet starting sillouetted against the gray of the impending squall, the beer and political arguments on the way back, and the handshakes of the friends I sailed with when we left the dock. What does this woman have, or anyone who takes the stat syndrome beyond normal rivalry and into the realm of obsessed behavior?

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in the case I am thinking of bons, they are pretty active bugs. I just thought it was odd. I usually leave a note if a bug isn't in the cache it is supposed to be. I hadn't considered the case of noting its presence just for the sake of it...

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If you're the owner of a Bug that's supposedly in a cache, but hasn't moved or been mentioned for a while, it can be comforting to know that it's still there, even if it isn't travelling.

 

I'd welcome any reports of people seeing my bugs in caches, even if they didn't move them along. A note or a grab-and-drop into the same cache - either would serve the purpose to provide a "pulse".

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at least it tells the owner that the bug is alive...

 

In short, better that than nothing.

Well, yeah, I can see that, but recently one of my TB's was taken to an event cache. I must've gotten 40 or 50 emails in two days for all of the people that "saw it" at the event.....that kind of logging I can do without.

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at least it tells the owner that the bug is alive...

 

In short, better that than nothing.

Well, yeah, I can see that, but recently one of my TB's was taken to an event cache. I must've gotten 40 or 50 emails in two days for all of the people that "saw it" at the event.....that kind of logging I can do without.

It's all part of the journey of a travel bug. :lol:

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at least it tells the owner that the bug is alive...

 

In short, better that than nothing.

Well, yeah, I can see that, but recently one of my TB's was taken to an event cache. I must've gotten 40 or 50 emails in two days for all of the people that "saw it" at the event.....that kind of logging I can do without.

It's all part of the journey of a travel bug. :mad:

Well, this is just my opinion, and I know lots of other people feel differently, but as far as I'm concerned, 1: Events should not be counted as a cache find; 2: Caches at an event that are set out on a table for people to walk by and sign the log should not be counted; 3: TB's laid out on a table at an event for people to walk by and copy down the tag numbers to count them in their "finds" is just wrong. I don't care about the numbers, but what fun is it when you just have to walk up to a table in a shelter house or at a bar to log a cache or a TB? It seems to me that the people who do this are doing it only for the numbers. But, they play their game, I play mine, who really cares, right? I just think it's kinda defeating the whole purpose of the hobby to do it that way. For me, if I don't actually go and find the cache in a hiding place, and actually find a TB in a hidden cache, it's just not geocaching....and it's just not any fun.

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Help? We are supposed to ask for help? Hmm. Anybody want to help me find Wrong Way? I'm beginning to think I'm looking in the wrong place. But that would be true only if the top of the cliff hung over the site. (Besides, I think it's private property up there.) <_<

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