Filing for OPM Disability Retirement: The Novel Approach

The genre represents the highest form of literature.  Poetry possesses its eccentric beauty; the short story its ease of brevity for the reader to pick up and finish in convenience of time, and thus its popularity; the biography and the epistemologically privileged cousin, the autobiography, its authentic historicity; and others by design of self-promotion, as Truman Capote’s “non-fiction novel” (an oxymoron?).

But the novel is the king of prose; of a narrative form which allows for many rooms in an endless castle of hidden trap doors and secret galleys full of antiquities and doorways yet to be revealed.  Perhaps that is why, used as an adjective, it defines a uniqueness of approach, akin to the traditional use of the word as a noun representing the highest form of art.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s positional duties with the Federal government or the U.S. Postal Service, engaging in a “novel” idea may be the best and only option left.

Where the medical condition no longer allows for the continuation of one’s career, and yet the Federal or Postal employee believes that he or she can still remain productive in the employment arena, it is indeed a novel approach for a benefit to pay for one’s inability to perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, and yet allow concurrently for the Federal or Postal employee to enter into the private sector, obtain a second vocation, and make up to 80% of what one’s former position currently pays.

For the Federal or Postal employee who is considering filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, it is precisely that allowance of continuation of productivity which fairly recognizes that there is not necessary incompatibility between a medical condition and contribution of talents.

Like the novel genre and the novel idea, they both acknowledge the penultimate value of human creativity, and allow for the characters to develop in the unfolding saga of a story yet untold.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

Federal Disability Retirement: The Hug That Wasn’t

Regrets are priceless; they lack both a marketplace value, as well as a worth beyond applicability of accounting principles.  The conceptual void of negation; the paradox of non-existence and nothingness; the chasm of obsolescence and absence where once perceptual conformity allowed for the revelation of a thing; these are all within the imaginative mind of the human puzzle.

What possible evolutionary utility can be ascribed to things that did not happen, could have, but never did, and where the pit of void in one’s stomach leaves a dissatisfying wanting of that which could have been?  In the quietude of a sleepless night, when images of past concerns invade and prevent that final lull into a dreamworld of peaceful intent, those thoughts of missed opportunities, bumps in the night of moments forgotten by interludes of dusty memories once enlivened but now deadened with time and fading photographs darkened by degeneration of remembrances once clung to; in a twinkle of twilight, a sense of regret can pervade.

It has often been said that, on the eve of one’s deathbed, one never remembers the time of work unfulfilled; rather, we recount the time lost of things we did not do because we were too busy with work.  Regret does not cull the graveyards of memories lost about parallel universes involving work left undone at the office; instead, it reaches into the bottomless chasm of simple recollections, like the hug that never was.

Medical conditions often serve as a reminder of important priorities, and tend to impose the sequence of one’s lives, reordering them into a listing of priceless artifacts, like uncut diamonds lost in the sands of time.  Suddenly, one’s mortality is in question, and more than getting meaningless tasks done, the vitality of relationships come to the fore.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suddenly recognize that a medical condition is beginning to prevent one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, the sense of regret often accompanies the realization, but is also and just as often a misplaced case of loyalty.  Why should fealty be sworn to an agency which is impervious to human suffering?  How can a guilty conscience pervade when the Federal or Postal employee has already given beyond what is required, for years and decades already lost?

Federal Disability Retirement is a benefit open to Federal and Postal employees who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition impedes continuation with an agency or the U.S. Postal Service based upon a legal criteria of proof of preponderance of the evidence.  Guilt and regret should never be a part of the process.  Filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is an employment right, accorded by statute, and should be done once the Federal or Postal employee recognizes that one cannot perform at least one or more of the essential elements of one’s positional duties.  Whether under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, it is a benefit tapped into only through proof by evidentiary sufficiency.

And like the hug that wasn’t, the failure to file for Federal Disability Retirement is tantamount to the negation of rationality when continuation in circumstances of employment only exacerbates the pain, prolongs the suffering, and extends the nightmare; leaving to wonder the capacity of the human animal, the quietude of regrets and the forlorn despair of the empty space left, when once we tried to embrace a loved one, but instead spent that time serving a master who had long since gone home to his family.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal OPM Disability Retirement Lawyer: The Scent of Decay

Animals steer clear of it; the growing stench is a warning, a harbinger for the wary; it is only an attraction to vultures and other scavenging birds of prey; civilized societies deal with it by slapping an FDA food label on items, long before the bacteria of decomposition begins to cannibalize and self-immolate.

The reality of the olfactory response is to curl up one’s nostrils; the metaphor encapsulates the recognition of weakness and vulnerability, and the herd mentality of attacking the weakest in the evolutionary race of disseminating one’s greater gene pool by diminishing the population of the weak, thus providing a justifying basis for extermination and dominance.

In the microcosmic context of a Federal workplace, the scent of decay compels a reconstituting of loyalties and forgetfulness of past accomplishment; what you did yesterday, matters little; what you have the potential to do, matters most; what you can no longer do, destroys all mattering.

For U.S. Government employees and Postal workers, the time for change comes not necessarily with the seasons of nature, but when a medical condition begins to impact one’s ability and capacity to perform all of the essential elements of one’s positional duties.  Medical conditions represent vulnerability; and whether the Federal or Postal employee has the best of relationships with one’s supervisor, coworkers or the agency and department as a whole, the scent of decay immediately follows upon a diminution of productivity and potentiality.

The evolutionary human instinct to follow the dominant and ignore the vulnerable is one which defies replacement by artifice and societal niceties; suddenly, the star employee has found disfavor, and it matters not whether the fault can be attributed to laziness, incompetence — or a medical condition which cannot be controlled or helped.

OPM Federal Disability Retirement is an employment benefit which accompanies all Federal and Postal employees who are under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset; it allows for Federal and Postal employees who can no longer perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, because of a medical condition, to obtain an annuity in order to move forward in one’s life.  Once obtained, there is a possibility for a second vocation, and to earn up to 80% of what one’s (now former) Federal or Postal position currently pays, on top of the Federal Disability annuity itself.

As man lives no more in the wilds of pure survivability, where beast and burdens of hunger have been replaced by white collars and polite salutations of meaningless vacuity; so the appearance of empathy and magnanimity of intent may mask, for a time, the scent of decay; until the pounding hoof prints fade in the settling dust of that herd which sensed the vulnerability, where the howling pack of wolves and wild beasts come gathering in the twilight of snarling tensions; and standing still in a forest of wild beasts will not save the doe from the savagery of civilized society; for, while headlight hunting may be outlawed, it is the frozen deer in the headlights which waits upon a desolate tundra while the scavengers await the reaching arms of the scent of decay.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire