FERS Disability Retirement Law: The Gist of Life

The gist of life is similar to the grist of life: They both stem from the same question — what is the “essence” of X?

So, when a person comes in late to a conference, he or she asks the natural question, “So, give me the gist of what has been discussed before I arrived.”  Meaning, thereby, that a short synopsis of the “essence” of what has been discussed — i.e., the meat, the substance, the main points, etc., of the meeting.

Often, when watching a movie, reading a novel, coming into the middle of a conversation, and many other forms and formats, besides, a person can quickly get the gist of what is being discussed, what the movie is about, how the novel is progressing, etc.  Most people have a need and desire to comprehend the gist of what has been encountered.  While peripheral details are often important, unless one has understood the gist of whatever is being viewed, there is a sense of unease which develops.

That’s why husbands turn to their wives in exasperation with the pointed question, “But what is the point of it?”  For children, however, it is often the peripheral things which are most important — not whether the story has any central meaning, but the funny way in which Dad reads it; not in whether you come out clean from a bathtub, but whether there are enough soapsuds with colorful reflections; and not whether you have perfectly picked up after yourself, but to be praised for how you tried your best, etc.

We often forget that.  For, the gist of life when we grow older has more to do with how we conducted ourselves, and less with how successfully others view us.  Then, when a medical condition hits us, we realize truly what the gist of life is all about — not how many hours we worked, but which meals we missed with our kids.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition and where the medical condition impacts the careers of the Federal or Postal worker, contemplation of initiating an effective Federal Disability Retirement application under the FERS system becomes the gist of what needs to be done.  The gist of life, suddenly, is that which was always taken for granted and never thought about — one’s health.

Contact a FERS Disability Lawyer who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law, and consider the gist of life — of one’s health, to begin with.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill
Lawyer exclusively representing Federal and Postal employees to secure their Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

 

Federal Disability Retirement Law: The Ill-Fitted Life

Have you ever worn a shirt which is ill-fitting?  When you first put it on, you have a sense that something is not right — whether it is too tight at the shoulders, or perhaps the stomach (at which point you pull that extended belly inward, fooling yourself that the contraction is actually your natural way of walking about, despite the uncomfortable manner of breathing); or, perhaps the collar leaves too much space and tightening the tie only folds and creases the gap, making your neck appear as though you are climbing out from a sewer drain.

You say to yourself, “Well, maybe it just needs to be worn throughout the day and will resolve itself”, and so you go out the door against your better judgment, ignoring the cautionary voice which keeps getting louder with each step away from the opportunity to go back and change.  So, you wear it throughout the day, and you are self-conscious.  You avoid people; you turn sideways when speaking to others, hoping that by making any visual perspective somewhat indirect, no one will notice that which you can plainly feel.  You go into the bathroom more than usual to view yourself in the mirror, and each time, you convince yourself that it looks fine; nothing out of the ordinary; no one will notice.

Such is the metaphor for the ill-fitted life.  You know it; you can feel it; and throughout, deep down, it is with you always.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of your Federal or Postal job, you know in your heart of hearts that continuing in that job constitutes the very definition of the ill-fitted life.

Contact an attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law and begin the process of turning back so that you can change out of that ill-fitting shirt, and initiate the process of preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application under FERS, through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill
Lawyer exclusively representing Federal and Postal employees to secure their Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

 

Federal Worker Disability Retirement: The Unresolved Problem

It won’t go away on its own.  We might wish it did; we might try to “will it” away; or, one might consider just ignoring it.

There are, to be sure, some problems which resolve themselves.  Children and their emotionally-fraught years of teenage problems — they often resolve themselves through age and distance; although, in this day and age where greater danger lurks in the dark web of the ethereal world, the job of the parent often is to make sure the problems don’t compound themselves into irreversible calamities.

A limp, too, might resolve itself.  And if you step in some dog-doo — yes, over time, walking with it on different surfaces will eventually scrape it all off from the soles of your shoes.  But as with children and dog-doo, it is often a good idea to take the time and initiate some action which is aggressive, positive and deliberate.

Filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS requires just such an approach, because in the end, the chronic and debilitating medical condition is one of those unresolved problems.

Contact an OPM Disability Attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and begin the deliberative process of tackling the unresolved problem.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill
Lawyer exclusively representing Federal and Postal employees to secure their Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

 

Medical Retirement under FERS: The Memory of Time

Ogawa’s novel, The Memory Police, is a dystopian narrative with an interesting theme: How long do memories last upon the disappearance of a person or thing?

In the novel itself, of course, the memory is somehow erased concurrently with the disappearance of the entity; but in real life, how long are we able to hold onto a cherished memory — of a person whom we were fond of; of an event or occurrence which was significant in our lives; of an object no longer in use?

Who remembers, for instance, those “bag phones” that we plugged into the cigarette lighter of our car?  Or of days when a horse was the only mode of transportation?  Is the art of knitting quickly vanishing because people no longer have the time to engage in an activity which not only takes time, but requires patience and sustained sedentary focus?  And even of days — if all calendars and indicia of days marked and months delineated segments were to vanish, how long would we be able to retain a memory of “time”?

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, the memory of time is often a vanishing of that time before the medical condition began to have its impact upon you.  There was a time before the medical condition; now and for the immediate future, it is the focus upon that medical condition which seems to dominate everything.

Consult with an attorney who specializes in FERS Disability Retirement Law and begin to consider a time before, when the Memory of Time was of a time when your Federal or Postal career was not dominated by a memory of constant harassment by your agency or the Postal Service.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement: Whole is greater than the sum

The “full” adage, of course, is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and connotes the idea that the interaction of the various components or elements constitute, in their entirety, a greater effect and impact than the efficacy of quantifying the singular components in their individual capacities added merely together.  It is the working in tandem of individual components that creates a greater whole than the sum of its independent parts, and this can be true whether in a negative or positive sense.

One has only to witness a crowd of individuals working together, whether in riot control or as a military unit, to witness an active, positive impact or, in a negative sense, a pack of wild dogs attacking their prey — working in coordination, circling, attacking in conjunction with one another, etc.  Medical conditions have a similar negative impact; we tend to be able to “handle” a single health crisis, but when they come in bunches, we often fall apart at the seeming enormity of the impact and the dire perspective it engulfs us with.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who have a sense of being overwhelmed, where the medical conditions seem to take on a whole greater than the sum of their individual components, it may be time to prepare, formulate and file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.

Sometimes, it is necessary to recognize the dominance of the greater whole in order to focus upon the elements which have taken on a lesser role — like taking care of one’s health.  Prioritizing matters is important, and when one’s health has taken on a secondary status and where the compendium of medical problems have taken on an exponential effect deleterious to one’s well-being, the Federal or Postal employee should consider consulting with an attorney who specializes in obtaining Federal Disability Retirement benefits.

Such a consultation may prove Aristotle’s wisdom to be correct — that the whole of such a consultation is greater than the sum of their individual words combined, or something close to that.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement: Those intersecting connections

We hear all the time about the shrinking world, the smaller universe, the global village – all metaphors to help and understand, to comprehend and be able to withstand within the insanity of a world that continues to intrude, intersect and impose itself upon every corner and aspect of lives lived and daily interrupted.  It is a way for people to cope with the fact that we can no longer avoid the reality of those intersecting connections from worlds, cultures and universes that make up the daily reality of our walking lives.

The newspapers globalize each and every issue; the television and cable news outlets care little for local news unless it, too has some national consequences; and so we live with the anomaly that the only time you might hear about your own hometown is if some horrific event occurs that other people in other towns might care about.  And, even when a story is reported about an event that occurs just around the corner from the news station, headquarters or whatever manner of identifying the central place where all of the equipment, studios and personnel gather to emit their airwaves of newsfeeds, they act as if it is occurring in some distant county or country, with perhaps a bit of weeping as an afterthought with a statement like, “And it makes it all the worse because it happened just in our own neighborhood!”

The world is indeed one comprised of intersecting connections, and we voluntarily allow for those connections to make our own perspectives molded into “theirs” by inviting various cable channels into our living rooms.  Do we really have a choice?  Can we just remain ignorant and ignore the reality of the global economy, the extended village and the universal concerns of the day?  How do we live with the complexities of intersecting connections, when we can barely deal with the local problems that beset us within the cocoon of our own lives?

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to impact the daily ability and capacity to perform all of the essential elements of the Federal or Postal job, the microcosm of intersecting connections may well be magnified to a level where it competes with what is occurring on a more global scale.

Suddenly, the Federal Agency is moving to put pressure on you – like those competing foreign companies you hear about in the world economy.  Or, the Supervisor is no longer being cordial – somewhat like the world leader who doesn’t return calls to the President.  Coworkers no longer treat you as an equal – like nations that suddenly go rogue without explanation.  You have to file a complaint – like submitting to a U.N. vote for sanctions.

We have all been groomed and prepared to think in terms of intersecting connections, but for the Federal and Postal employee who suffers from a medical condition such that preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application becomes a necessity, it all comes back to a more local and personal connection: one’s health, and the need to focus upon one’s personal life.

No matter how global the world has become, never forget that it is the personal life of close connections that really only matters in the end.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement: Leisure, nature’s antonym

Observe the animals excluding the human one; what do they all do, except perhaps the male lion who awaits the predatory prowess of the lioness and her cubs who hunt for the royal crown; and the rest, of constant pecking, searching, laboring just to survive.  Nature’s law requires survival; survival mandates predatory consumption; the rest look out that they are not in the sequence of a food chain that includes one’s self.  For, it is the resting bird, the supine squirrel and the slumbering rabbit that becomes the meal of Nature’s law.

Leisure, by contrast, is a relatively modern concept.  In the yesteryears when wagons traveled upon roads uncharted, and weekends were comprised of a Sunday afternoon beyond the morning prayers and sitting upon the hard bench of a preacher’s sermon about sin and hellfire, even then the food to be prepared for the evening meal, the water to be gathered from the river beyond the horizon, and the animals that required tending lest fences left rotting allowed for the nighttime burglars of foxes and coyotes to wander uninvited for an unsolicited meal; no, leisure is nature’s antonym, unknown and relatively unheard of except in these days of modernity, where the right to full weekends and paid vacations and “down-time” and sustained interludes of systematic quietude are a necessity within this world of constant razzle-dazzle in noisy streets of uninterrupted brackets of thunderous blaring where we cannot even think without being bombarded with informational overload.

Leisure requires time; time necessitates periods of calm away from the constancy of survival’s instinct, where the appetitive division of the soul is taking a break from the search for satisfaction, thus allowing for a reflective repose, an interlude of contemplation and a self-recognition that, yes, I am actually enjoying myself in doing this mindless activity or fun engagement.  Leisure is, in the end, nature’s antonym, in the very resistance to being able to relax, to reflect and to remain relatively rested in retrospective renditions of relentless reaping in the reality of raucous and riotous living (sorry about the alliteration, but it cannot be helped for fear of further farcical fancies fettered forever from feckless and foreign flattery).

In modernity, it has somehow become turned upside down, where leisure was once unheard of, dangerous to the very instinct of survival, and rarely engaged except in the slumber of midnight exhaustion.  Now, it is declared to be its very opposite – of a necessary means to survive, and without which work and ‘making a living’ cannot be accomplished because time away allows for the restorative powers to reenergize those proverbial batteries gone dead.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who need to contemplate filing a Federal Disability Retirement application through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, there is little time to contemplate leisure as Nature’s antonym.  Chronic medical conditions tend to be a type of ‘work’ in and of itself – exhausting because of the constant attention it requires, and profoundly fatiguing upon one’s body, mind and soul.

That being said, obtaining a Federal Disability Retirement is necessary for precisely that reason – as a means of focusing upon one’s health, in order to attain a level of normalcy such that tomorrow can be another day to battle. In that sense, preparing, formulating and filing a Federal Disability Retirement application is an exception to the rule – for, it is not leisure as Nature’s antonym, but more likened to the days of yesteryear when the one time the body required leisure was to rest in order to regain one’s health, just to have another tomorrow to battle the greater world of predatory juggernauts.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement: The Wake-up Call

It can be requested pursuant to a prior arrangement or, with today’s technology, prewired on one’s own electronic device.  Time was when there existed an employed switchboard operator sitting in front of a pock-marked surface deftly inserting plugs of a dozen or more connections simultaneously, like an octopus whose coordinated extremities swirl about under and over with cross-purposed entanglements, pulling and inserting, with headphones half dangling, calmly stating, “This is your wakeup call.  Have a good morning!”

Then, of course, there is the other, more unwelcome meaning, of a negative connotation concerning an event or occurrence which portends of that which one may have always known, but only now realizes because of the impending doom.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers, it may be the chronicity of the medical condition; or, the increasing outside pressures continuing to pile on, of leave-usage restrictions, suspension letters, placing you on a PIP, or the ultimate proposal of removal.

Whatever the proverbial wake-up call, it is time to prepare, formulate and file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether one is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.   The call itself is merely the beginning of the process; there is the entirety and complexity to undergo, including the gathering of the compendium of medical documentation, the formulation of one’s Statement of Disability and the coordinating of all of the elements of the case, and then the submission and waiting.

The bureaucratic and administrative components of the process can sometimes appear to be archaic and somewhat anachronistic; but like the switchboard operator of yesteryear, the necessity of the service is never in doubt; it is merely the apparatus of change which remains relevant, and properly, and effectively preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits is a mandate of action compelled by the wakeup call entitled “Life and the inevitability of change“.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire
Federal Disability Retirement Lawyer

 

Federal Disability Retirement: The Misfit

The herd mentality must of necessity have a survivability factor; otherwise, there is little to explain the illogical repetition of the historical recurrence of human folly for behavioral anthropology.  In the modern era, being “different” is a sign of rebellion, and the cultural tidal wave of the Sixties in altering the normative landscape of music, art, religion and social customs, revealed the pinnacle of self-destructive behavior — until it became clear that being a misfit itself was merely the convention.

Behaving “normally” means that one does not make “waves”; in a highly bureaucratized society, the importance of non-innovation and complete compliance is regarded as sacrosanct.  Loud, boisterous behavior; conduct outside of the normative inflexibility of societal perspectives; that which is acceptable as quirkiness or eccentricities, as opposed to destructive explosions of tendencies bordering upon insanity; the invisible line between the misfit and clinical commitment to a psychiatric facility is a thin reed, indeed.

Often, however, it is uncontrollable circumstances which impose upon an individual the unwanted label of being an “outsider”.  Medical conditions often have a tendency to promote such a state.  It is like being labeled a plague-carrying contagion by the CDC; once whispered, the rumors begin to spread.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to prevent one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, being labeled a misfit becomes a “given”. Others begin to shy away from an association; some are told bluntly not to have contact with “that one”.

Loss of normative acceptance within any community or society is an important factor for success; somehow, despite all of the legal safeguards, EEO regulations and protective statutes applying to disabled individuals, the herd mentality of yore nevertheless prevails.  For Federal and Postal workers, the only pragmatic exit is to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal worker is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.

Is it a retreat or an escape?  Not really; rather, just a means of looking out for one’s own best interests.  The medical condition itself should always be paramount in considering one’s life; attending to it properly means that one must have the time and energy to treat the underlying malady; and continuing in an employment atmosphere where acceptance is avoided, and empathy is rare, is also an unstated definition of engaging in self-flagellation.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Retiring from Federal Service with OPM Disability Retirement: Happy Puppy

Overused words lose their intended efficacy.  Perhaps the point of decay came about when the (unnamed) fast-food company decided to combine the word with the term, “meal”, and thereafter kids, grandkids and celebrity popularization effectively killed the last semblance of meaning.  But when watching the exuberance exhibited by a puppy, where commonplace activities are engaged in with reactive and unbounded energy, it is appropriate and meaningful to compound the two, and ascribe the descriptively emotive, “happy puppy“.

Whether it is the latter term which enlivens the former, or vice versa, is a question of inference; for, with the loss of meaning generally of the former, but with a retained appreciation that the latter is always inextricably bundled with ecstatic joy and delicious laughter; sometimes, by mere inference and inseparable conceptual coalescence of words, the singular vacuity of a word can be reinvigorated.  It also is often ascribed in anthropomorphic terms, as well as its opposite:  men and women are described as “happy puppies” or “sad puppies”, and the accompanying imagery is one of circumstantial delightfulness or despondency.

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 Federal or Postal job, if the elusive concept of “happiness” has been replaced with the daily toil of anguish and turmoil of angst, it is perhaps time to consider filing for Federal OPM Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal worker is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.

When once the Federal or Postal employee was described as “one happy puppy”, but now avoidance and treatment as the winds of a plague have brushed upon the workplace each time the Federal or Postal employee enters the premises, and whispers of the arrival of that “sad puppy” abound like a pervasive brushfire of vituperative verbal assault; then, it is time to prepare, formulate and file for Disability Retirement benefits through OPM.

For, when the reality of a circumstance overshadows the conceptual force of words, then it becomes an opportunity for the sad puppy to seek the higher grounds of greater joy, and to wag its proverbial tail into the sunset of a happy life.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire