FERS Medical Retirement: The Hard Acceptance Beyond

When an expectation of a day or an event comes and goes, and suddenly the mundaneness of daily toil comes back with a vengeance of regularity, the hard acceptance beyond is suddenly what we must face.

It is similar to that ”Aha!” Moment of realization — where a gestalt explosion of awareness occurs.  But even at the highest level of enlightenment or realization, such a moment is merely a minor point in time — the hard work comes about afterward when we have to apply the realized moment to our everyday lives.

The excitement, uniqueness, or even eccentricity of a given point in time always follows with the boredom of regularity where old problems are merely replaced with different ones; that is why, whether it is a Holiday, an affair of infidelity, or some unexpected windfall, or merely a unique insight, the hard acceptance beyond is the difficult part.

Yet, the best work in life comes about during the daily grind of disciplined work, and not at the arbitrary moment of some enlightened flashpoint.  And it is the hard acceptance that life comes roaring back with a vengeance of mundaneness after that flashpoint of excitement when the adrenaline wanes and the uniqueness fades, that one either accepts with resigned submission or with renewed vigor.

Is it then seen as either a challenge or an Impossible obstacle that cannot be overcome?  How the question is framed and answered will determine the rest of your life.

Medical conditions present a similar life-altering challenge.  Whether by an accident or disabling medical event, that moment in time passes, and then we must face the remainder of life’s linear gift.  It is the hard acceptance beyond the event which must be faced.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers, that hard acceptance beyond may include the need to prepare, formulate and file an effective FERS Disability Retirement application through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management — and it will surely be a fight, but one worth engaging.

Contact a FERS Disability Attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law, and get the help needed to help you get the hard acceptance beyond.

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 & Postal Disability Retirement: Failing to Act

Ours is a society of inertia.  We talk a lot; move around much papers and information; sit and post on various social media outlets; watch movies and shows; and within that flurry of seeming activity, we satisfy ourselves that we are doing things which matter.  But when it comes time to act, when action actually actuates — we so often fail miserably.

It is as Heidegger once quipped — that we have our distracting projects in life in order to avoid thinking about substantive issues and the inevitable.  There is a time to act — of initiating a course of action; of taking preparatory steps; of formulating a plan for the future.

For Federal employees and U.S.Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition no longer allows you to continue in your Federal or Postal career, the time to act is now.

Consult with a FERS Disability Attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law and begin the process of reversing the usual inaction of inertia, and refute the customary approach of failing to act.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement Denials: Selective reasoning

Of course, we all engage in it; some, merely by withholding certain known facts; others, by emphasizing and asserting portions of the logic employed while ignoring or deliberately averting the focus of other aspects.  Selective reasoning through deliberate omission is the height of pragmatic oppression; for, when it is accomplished with knowledge and self-admission of premeditation, it involves a mind that knows the difference between proper application of logical reasoning and the intentional misrepresentation of facts.

We engage in such folly during the course of normal fights and argumentation; for, to win is the basis of arguing, and the ends often justify the means.  Logic is a learned tool.  It is the foundation of sound reasoning.  It is not an inherent, in-born or even in-bred character of man, but it can bring out the evil therein.

As a tool, those who are good at it have a greater responsibility to use it wisely, honestly and with proper motives.  It is the “selective” part of the reasoning that makes for honesty of dishonesty in the reasoning process, and the anomaly and irony, of course, is that the process itself — of reasoning — necessarily involves selectivity, for logical argumentation encapsulates proper and effective selection of facts, syllogistic approaches and propositional logic all bundled into one.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management engages in selective reasoning, and their denials of Federal Disability Retirement applications reveal a level of such selectivity that one must conclude that it is being done intentionally and with deliberate knowledge.

Beware of denials; for, they try and make it appear as if you never had a chance to begin with in your FERS Disability Retirement application. OPM will selectively choose to extrapolate from various medical reports and records, and fail to mention or highlight the selective portions omitted, then reason that there was “insufficient” medical evidence despite facts and rational argumentation to the contrary.

Do not despair, and do not simply allow for the 30-day time period in which to file for Reconsideration to lapse; for it is precisely such selective reasoning that is meant to discourage, and to make you think that the denial is dismissively disproportionate so as to justify giving up altogether — which is precisely what their selective reasoning is meant to accomplish.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Attorney Representation for OPM Disability Claims: The facade

We all do it; but the fact that all engage in it does not mean that the quality of what occurs behind the mask is equal in kind.  What betrays the workings of that which lurks behind the Noh mask?  Does the backstabber ever recognize the evil that is perpetrated any more than the Wizard behind the curtain believed that something untoward was being accomplished?

In architecture, a facade is the outward appearance or frontage that represents the initial encounter, entrance or first impression when approaching or entering; it is a neutral term in that it doesn’t connote or denote anything beyond that which it is — the first impression of the outward appearance.  But when that same term is applied to human beings or other contexts, it takes on a secondary implication of doubt, motive, underlying processes or even evil intent that is deliberately being concealed for the nefarious winds that need cover.

We all wear them; some are more adept at maintaining it in order to conceal and veil; while others can only establish it for a short period, then confess to all that nothing beneath was meant to harm.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who carry a facade in order to conceal the medical condition that continues to debilitate, deteriorate and prevent the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, the strain upon one’s psyche can be enormous and trying.

Over time, the facade must by necessity begin to crumble, to fade, to unravel and reveal; it is the inevitability that is often so fatiguing.  When the critical point of intersection occurs — where the priority of the medical condition surpasses the need to maintain appearances — it may be time to consider preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be filed through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.

At some point, we all have to become “real”, and the facade that hides the face of a building does so without concealing anything precisely because there is no “there” behind the face; but the human being that puts on the Noh mask cannot for long maintain the facade that conceals the human suffering within.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The mythology we create

Folklores and mythologies we have read as children; they stir the imagination, of gods in faraway lands in times now forgotten, and of tales of daring and courage in the moral plays of a universe now turned between the tides of time and the ebbing of history.

We are told that they were a manner in which to explain the unexplainable; that, until the great Age of Science came along and placed everything in its logical perspective, we once believed in the mythology of gods, superstitions and the folklore of our own imaginations.

But what of the mythologies we create in modernity?  Of the infallibility of science, when the very judgment and discourse is still based upon human frailty and self-interest?  Of phenomena which we cannot explain but somehow ascribe words that sound meaningful and complex to the understanding of others, and so we continue on in the mysteries we create?

And of mythologies we create — whether in our own minds without ever sharing with others, or the daydreams we are trapped in which we repeat almost daily, as an escape from the drudgery of the reality we must endure; or, perhaps of the lie that began as a pebble in the stream but kept growing over the years until it became a boulder that stemmed the tide of discourse and created a dam which fed a lake?

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to prevent the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, the mythology we create can be somewhat on a lesser scale of mischief or criminality.

It need not tell the story of a civilization’s origins or in explaining some overwhelming phenomena of the universe.  No, it can be a story that is created to explain away the excessive use of Sick Leave or Annual Leave; it can be the mere telling of a tale that tomorrow the medical condition will miraculously go away; or it can be in the very self-deception that you can continue to endure the pain and suffering and hide it from your coworkers, supervisors and the Agency as a whole.

Federal Disability Retirement is a benefit that allows for the Federal or Postal worker to retire early based upon one’s medical inability to perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job.

In filing a Federal Disability Retirement application, however, it may require you to shatter the mythology we have come to create, and face the reality that the gods of thunder and lightening no longer throw down the zigzagging bolts of anger and revenge from high above, but rather, the rains of today may give way to the sunshine of tomorrow, explainable by the natural causes of science and that this amazing world of causality may yet be defined without purpose.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Life Lessons

Most of us stumble through it, and somehow end up down unexpected corridors of unplanned venues; and then we have the nerve to think that we can have kids and impart wisdom we never learned, refused to lived by, and rarely listened to.  It is said that hypocrisy is the characteristic of the common farce; it just happens to infect everyone else, and never ourselves.  But there is an evolutionary determinant even in the comedy of life; it used to be that Western Philosophy would teach us to always seek out the substance of a thing, and to recognize mere attributes and appearances for what they are — recognizing that superficiality conceals the essence of Being.

Now, there are popular books which tell us that “faking it” is okay, so long as everyone else is too stupid to know it.  Then, there is our job, our careers and that vocation at which we spend the majority of our lives pursuing.  One day, we wake up, and find that the manifestation  of a medical condition makes it impossible for us to continue.

What do we do about it?  Procrastinate.  Deny.  Avoid the issue.  But reality has a way of ignoring our pleas of ignorance and avoidance.  Harassment at work; Letters Warnings; imposition of a PIP; Proposed Removal; Removal.  It is not that we did not see it coming; we just hoped that life’s lessons would make a detour around our individual circumstances.

Fortunately, however, for Federal employees and U.S. Postal Workers, there is a consolation benefit in the event that a life lesson involving a medical condition impacts the Federal or Postal employee’s ability and capacity to perform all of the essential elements of one’s positional duties as a Federal employee or U.S. Postal Service worker.  Filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits allows for the Federal or Postal employee to have “another chance” at life’s misgivings, by providing a base annuity, allowing for work in the private sector on top of the OPM Disability Retirement annuity, and to garner a time for restorative living in order to attend to the medical conditions by retaining and maintaining one’s FEHB.

In the end, there is a conceptual distinction to be made between “Life Lessons” and “Life’s Lessons”; the former is what our parents and the juggernaut of historical inevitability tried to teach, and which we deliberately ignored; the latter is that which impacts us daily and personally, and to which we must by necessity respond.

For the Federal employee and U.S. Postal worker who suffers from a medical condition, such that the Federal or Postal employee must file 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, the lesson of life — whether as Life Lessons or as Life’s Lessons, is to take that stumbling former self who ended up in the corridors of the Federal Sector, and to straighten out the future course of events by preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application through OPM.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: Life’s Fathomless Diatribe

We tend to personify and project upon lifeless, inorganic and inert entities, not to mention the extrapolation of generalized and universal conceptual forms, and inject them with personalities, characteristics and living imprints.  Did Plato make this fatal mistake, or was he beyond our intellectual capacity, and perhaps like the mischievous character he provided in his dialogues, was he merely the siamese twin of Socrates and inextricably conjoined in body, mind and philosophical spirit, with that glint of the knowing jokester?

“Life”, as we like to make of the stuff which confounds us, is like the half-crazed homeless person who stands on the street corner and yells at us as we pass by.  Sometimes, we even get hit by a bombardment of spittle, and an unexpected whack on the head, leaving us stunned and helpless, faint with outrage and anxious that Mr. Life may follow us home.  And, indeed, he sometimes does.

Life is like that fathomless diatribe; and we are merely an audience of one, isolated, watchful, spectators who can only observe, sometimes shout back, and in a feeble attempt at altering destiny, weep in a heap of self-pity and trembling repose.  That is how the Federal employee and the U.S. Postal worker feels, in confronting the mammoth of the Federal Bureaucracy and the U.S. Postal Service, especially when the Federal employee and U.S. Postal worker are enmeshed in the weakened state of fighting a 3-front battle:  One’s own Federal agency or the U.S. Postal Service; a medical condition that has begun to impact the ability and capacity to perform all of the essential elements of one’s positional requirements; and the battle against “life” and all of its multitudinous facets of complexities.

Is “life” just another metaphorical voice in the darkness of time?  For the Federal or Postal worker, the time to file 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, must often be determined by the harkening voice of life’s trials and travails.  As OPM is just another behemoth to confront, in addition to one’s own agency or the U.S. Postal Service, so the preparation to “do battle” must include the tools of engagement:  the facts, the law, and the will to proceed.  And like life’s fathomless diatribe, the will to win must first and foremost be the amour of protection in preparing, formulating and filing for OPM Disability Retirement.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: The Lore of Yesteryear

The past is often the attraction of selective memories, the passion of antiseptically expunged yearnings, and represent less about factual accuracy than emotions bound to images.

With modern technology, mixed with the relative value of truth and the abandonment of universal principles transcending beyond time and cultural norms, the obsession with oral tradition and a clinging to unnamed tombs of yesteryear, when causes were worth fighting for, a handshake meant the seal of a deal without a follow-up fax or an email confirmation; and when people didn’t check the labels of food ingredients to verify MSG, GMO or other terrifying acronyms which undermine the palate and appetite; those were the days gone by, and the yearning that defines the embellishment of heroism as each day marches in the timelessness of forgotten marshes of mindful embrace.

Time was…but then, we pause, and realize that it is the “now” and the “today” which must be faced.  Reminiscences are good for the soul, but rarely profitable for the pocketbook.  For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition (whether physical, psychiatric, or an intersecting compilation and aggregate of both) prevents the Federal or Postal employee under FERS or CSRS from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal positional duties, the attraction of the lore of yesteryear will often grow exponentially in parallel form as the medical condition progressively deteriorates.

That is because the convergence of present pain and the increasingly selective memories of past freedom from pain, extends to a future yearning for a time of quietude and peace where the medical condition has resolved itself and the body, mind and spirit can be free of the confinement of the debilitating medical condition.  That is a natural reaction of the human essence to be free.  But in order to do that, affirmative steps must be taken.  Life just doesn’t happen.

Filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is just such an affirmative step.  One cannot continue to cling to a fading past, and expect that the present will get any better, or that the future will result in greater peace and tranquility.  The future is now; the present is something to be acted upon; and the Lore of Yesteryear must be replaced with a growing sense of urgency to embrace memories not of fading photographs of unidentified tombstones of yore, but of living and vibrant experiences today encountered, to be savored for future generations.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Postal & Federal Disability Retirement: The Quiet Corridors of Shame

“Shame regards the world as virtue delights by advances, whereas the blushing eyes rustle past quietly in the night.”  Such adages, at one time or another in the history of words, linguistic battles, and pendulum tensions of behavior accepted and acceptable; moral turpitudes unconcealed and depiction of baseness meaningfully displayed; and so it goes, as standards crumble away and societal scorn diminutively dissipates with each passing day.

It was Mark Twain who quipped that Man is the only animal that blushes — or needs to.  But with the advent of the Internet, where Facebook and its corollary links (or, perhaps another way to describe them, as “co-conspirators”) reveal all, and everyone has bought into the idea that all things private can remain so by plastering everything in a public way, and Orwell’s contribution in his novel, 1984, is comparatively naive by standards of modernity.  Some would say that expungement of stigma and marks of unacceptable behavior have merely shifted and found replacements; regardless, it is always the people who shuffle in silence through the corridors of shame that have to live with the consequences.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are daily harassed and intimidated because of the vestiges and residuals of the medical conditions which prevent the performance of one or more of the essential elements of one’s positional duties in the Federal workforce or with the U.S. Postal Service, the dire targeting like the days of Darwin’s descriptive accounts of evolutionary forces aggregating for greater genetic survivability, lives today and in steady, vibrant form.

For U.S. Government employees who suffer from medical conditions, the old standards of empathy, concern, accommodation and neighborliness are not the exclusive societal inputs which are applied.  Rather, it is harassment, intimidation, scorn and impatience — those very vices which were publicly decried but privately reserved.

Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers are mere targets and fodder for the brute force of environmental determination.  For those Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who feel the brunt of Darwinian interludes, preparing, formulating and 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, is the proper course to take, the “manageable” route to travel, and often the only exit to follow.

Otherwise, the targeted Federal or Postal employee will merely continue to shuffle quietly down the corridors of shame, despite such vestiges allegedly having been made inconsequential by the political correctness of our times.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire