This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

If you read the phrase in this blog headline, you wouldn’t know for sure what it meant.

I didn’t.

Then I read a story that appeared in an Apple News blog.

It defined the term as one that applied to men who devised intentional strategic acts to avoid doing certain work around the house.  At any rate, that’s “strategic incompetence.”

I must confess that I have used the strategy to try to escape certain types of work around the house, but, without complaint, I:

•  Load the dishwasher (perhaps not as well as my wife, but I do it)
•  Fold towels in thirds to hang in the bathroom (learning that skill from my wife)
•  Make sure the toilet paper comes off the top of the roll (again a skill from my wife)

See, I have learned a few things in my 48 years of marriage!

One my “failures” involves not knowing how properly to pick stuff up at the grocery store, even if given a specific list of what to get and where the item is in the story.  My wife says I often come home with the wrong stuff. 

On purpose?  Who knows?

The Apple News story appeared under this headline:

Woman’s grocery list for husband goes viral and sparks conversation about men’s “strategic incompetence”

The story went on:

“The grocery list was beautiful, meticulous, a combination of text and photos painstakingly organized.  Each item featured a cut-out photograph, so there could be no mistaking it for a similar item, and included accompanying lines for quantity, aisle and price.  The list came with a hand-drawn map of the store.  Perfect, some education experts say, for a child working on gaining independence during their first-time grocery shopping.

“Except this list wasn’t for a child.  It was posted by a woman on the social media platform Tik Tok with the onscreen text, ‘When I have to send my husband to the store.’”

For me, the term “strategic incompetence,” if I understand it, can be applied in funny ways to the status of how men and women live together.  For some researchers, however, the term connotes far more, enough that they conduct massive research projects on the subject in order to arrive at major conclusions.

Don’t worry.  I won’t bore you here with summaries of that research.  Let me just say that “strategic incompetence” is a good way to describe some actions in a marriage that can make you laugh, not cry.

So, enough.  Just call me “strategically incompetent.”