Medical Retirement for Federal and Postal Employees: Stupid Mistakes

Our first reaction may be that such a phrase is in fact a tautology; for, to make a “mistake” is by definition to do something “stupid”, and so it is merely a redundancy to use and place both terms together.  But surely we can conceive of circumstances in which “making a mistake” turns out to be the very opposite of having done something “stupid”? […]

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The mistakes we make

There are those who make it their life’s goal not to have remorse for decisions made; but is that truly a worthwhile achievement?  At the end of it all, is there a special space on the unwritten tombstone that lists the mistakes avoided, the embarrassments averted, and the admissions of deficiencies concealed?  Is that not where much of Shakespearean web of deceits are constructed from – of attempting to cover up the insufficiencies otherwise already apparent in the foreboding appearances we attempt to portray? […]

Experience and Federal Disability Retirement Benefits

The vicious circularity of having or not having “experience” is comprised of the following: If too much weight is placed upon it and one is passed over because of its lack, then one will never be able to attain the experience needed in order to qualify; in order to attain experience, one must be given the opportunity to grow by trial and error; but such trial and error only reveals the lack thereof. […]

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Learning from Experience

The problems inherent in filing a Federal Disability Retirement application under FERS or CSRS are multi-fold and multi-tiered. Even today, after years and years of practicing in this particular area of law […]

FERS Medical Benefits: Avoiding Bumps and Potholes

Can one tell the difference between the two?  Perhaps if you concentrate upon the jarring experience — of the sudden rise and fall, however short in the millisecond of time when the bump is encountered where the vehicle is lifted up and suddenly jolted with a sudden crash, as distinct from the unanticipated crunch of a pothole and the jarring rise when the tire groans and the shock absorbers tremble […]

FERS Disability Retirement from OPM: The Task Ahead

We all talk in those terms, don’t we?  And when the future is no longer referred to, we begin to worry; for it is the notion of a future that keeps us alive in the present, while the past is merely a portrait of who we were and what made us today.  A person without a history is an enigma; of what we are doing presently informs others of where we are going; and of future plans — well, that reveals of character, […]

Early FERS Medical Retirement: Inside Life & Outside Appearance

Each of us lives an insular life.  It is that “private” side of us which remains so at our option.  How much of it is allowed into the public arena, and to whom we may share with, those are dependent upon multiple factors — of desiring to; of releasing information about ourselves that may allow for one to become “vulnerable”; […]

Federal OPM Disability Retirement Claims: Advice

The great thing about it is that most people are willing to give it out in endless streams of inarticulate bosh for free, and the rest of us are at liberty to do with it what we want.  With the advent of the Internet, and more so with the consolidation of all things electronic into a single, hand-held device — the so-called “Smartphone” […]

Filing for OPM Disability Retirement: Goals of abstract purity

Idealism allows for the plethora of such concepts; cynicism born of age and experience quells the exuberance of such vaunted beginnings.  When we were young — no, not the opening lines of a Christopher Robin poem where the hunt for a clove of honey is the day’s goal, but an observation about life’s folly — we harbored principles and moral codes that required strict purity: Success without compromise; […]

Federal Disability Retirement Application: Lost…

One’s age can be revealed as to whether, in the privacy of one’s thoughts, the ellipses is replaced with — “Lost in Space”, or even The Swiss Family Robinson.  The former is a television series that ran between 1965 and 1968; the latter, a novel by Johann David Wyss published in 1812 that few of us read anymore.  Another television series recalled from the dustbin of history’s classics; another novel and writer no longer read, remembered or studied. […]