Medical Retirement Benefits for US Government Employees: Managing

It is the present participle of the verb, to manage; but, then, who takes into account these days as to the grammatical application of a term?

It infers the successful control and direction of others (as in a supervisor “managing a group of employees in a project”), or of one’s self (as in the response to the question, “How are you doing”? The reply: “Oh, I am managing.”).

But the word has also come to have a negative inference — for, in contrast to “thriving” or “excelling”, it confers upon the subject the idea that one is in a state of mere existence or survival; of maintaining the status quo and stuck in a chronic purgatory.  To merely be “managing” is not the same as growing; it is, rather, like the football team that is continuing to “manage” a lead while the opponent is slowly making a comeback.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are merely managing to stay employed, the problem comes when the Agency begins to initiate a “Performance Improvement Plan” (a “PIP”) or, worse, prepares a notice of removal because of excessive absences or other issues.  “Managing” is not the same as thriving.

Contact a disability attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law and begin the process of moving forward as opposed to staying in place and merely “managing” a medical condition and its consequences upon one’s ability and capacity to remain employed.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Lawyer

 

FERS Disability Retirement Benefits: Managing Stress

Stress is the outside world impacting without guardrails the inner world of a person’s life, resulting in ravages upon the health and well-being of even the healthiest of individuals.  We can never completely be free of it; for, as every living organism is defined by movement and alacrity of purpose, so the forces of the objective universe are there to interfere and impede.  The most that we can do is “manage” stress.

Management of stress, however, will ultimately fail, inasmuch as stress over time, in incremental steps and microcosmic, subtle degradations that take its toll over time, will ultimately prevail.  How we manage it; to what extend we are able to withstand it; and to what base-line we begin this life of tolerating its consequences — these all play a role depending upon the uniqueness of each individual.  In the beginning, in youth and ignorance, we shrug it off and believe ourselves to be invincible; but as time and age begins to take its toll, we whimper at its incredible impact.  Health — whether mental or physical — is the wall that begins to crumble, whether by pock-marks of slow destruction or large chasms of gaping holes.

For Federal employees or 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, and where stress has over time eaten away at the guardrails of invincibility, you may want to contact an Federal Disability Attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law before proceeding with a FERS Disability Retirement application.

Stress Management having failed, the next step is to consider extricating one’s self from the destructive forces of stress itself, and preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal OPM Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, may be the best next course of action to accomplish that which everyone fails at: Managing Stress.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement: Beyond the apex

Few of us want to think of ourselves as past that point.  For, the “apex” is the top of it all; it is the place which is reached, and then there follows a downward trajectory such that what had been reached cannot be repeated; and from there forward, there are only memories, regrets, and echoes of past glories stated in hollow monotones that betray and failures of lives lived.

Mountain climbers persist in reaching new ones; it is the ever-pervasive “high” of the challenge faced, to be able to conquer new heights and reach for cliff faces never before overcome.  To try and reach the apex is to constantly grow; to have reached the apex, a completed task; and to have gone beyond the apex — the direction can only be of degradation in comparison to what was before.

We — none of us — want to think of our lives as in the past, or of slow and steady deterioration.  While our bodies become decrepit, we cling to an image of ourselves as being…25, 30, perhaps a little older?  Or even of immortality do we embrace; and of trading in secret pacts in order to retain our youth. Medical conditions tend to be reminders that the apex has been reached and we are on a journey beyond — though we often fail to realize that the “beyond” can be just as rewarding as the climb before.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal Workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, it will often “feel” as if such a move means that you are now beyond the apex — a “has been”, a “failure”, a person who is no longer a member of “the team”, etc.

Yet — though your Federal career or Postal job may become something in the past, beyond the apex should be seen not as the end of something, but the beginning of the next phase of your life.  Yes, beyond the apex is often a frightening thought, but it is also an opportunity to refocus and reorient your life upon the priorities that matter: Health, relationships, and what all of those politicians say when they leave office: In order to spend more time with my family.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Medical Retirement: The peril of procrastination

Time is considered to be a continuum; it remains throughout, and except for artificial slicing imposed by seasons or bifurcations recognized by night and day, sunlight or darkness, or other natural categorizations which creep beyond our calendars, “time” remains a rhythmic cycle barely noticed until deadlines scream to be met and the ageless alarm clock suddenly awakens.

Noticed when the hands on a clock move; of the hour hand, slowly and with slumbering care; of the minute hand, more deliberatively; and of the second hand that ticks away while we watch time pass by.

In this digital era, time refuses to “march on” as the metaphor once informed us, and instead stares silently through the redness of a glaring, impassive face.  Waiting makes for awareness of passing; waiting in line to get into this or that establishment; waiting in a doctor’s office; waiting for a train; or do we just wait because there is nothing left to do?

Procrastination is a form of waiting, except we put the proverbial cart before the horse: Instead of waiting for the allotted time or event to occur, we wait for its non-occurrence, then rush to complete the non-occurrence before the expiration of the allotted time.

Certain events make for pleasantry of time — as in being with others you enjoy; performing a deed of delight; or merely resting, relaxing, engaging in activities of mirth; while others extend the laborious into an unbearable anguish of unending torment — of pain, unwanted relations and uninvited calamities.

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, time can become an enemy if one fails to foresee the peril of procrastination.  At some point — and often, early on — it becomes obvious that filing for Federal Disability Retirement under FERS, through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, becomes a necessity.

Trying to qualify for OPM Disability Retirement benefits is a long and complex administrative process, and delaying that which one knows must be done is not merely the peril of procrastination, but an exacerbation and potential worsening of circumstances that may already require your attention today, if not yesterday or the day before.

For, in the end, it is not procrastination itself which creates the peril — rather, it is the peril of the medical condition left to time and its progressive deterioration — and that is why procrastinating can itself be avoided by consulting today, without delay, with an attorney who specializes in the the proper preparation, formulation and filing of an effective Federal or Postal Disability Retirement application.

Now, as for that chore that was left for tomorrow…

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Legal Representation on Federal Disability Retirement Claims: Joy and trials

It is the defining of life itself; of the spectrum across a wide range of peaks, valleys, proverbial mountaintops and chasms of tumults like a groan beneath the terrain of the earth.  We attempt to avoid the latter and quantitatively expand the former, thinking that if we fill our experiences with joy, the trials will be lessened or the impact less eventful.

There are gauges of summer, the plateau of fall; we sense the discontent of winter and the exhilaration of spring; and like the subtle pull of the orbs afar that impact the tides and moons of horses galloping in the night, the shudder of sensations unfelt and the future yet untold make anxious of us all.

Joy is the experience of human beings; trials, the objective world impinging upon the subjectivity of our daily refrain.  Can we even have one without the other?

We posit fictional hypotheticals that probably never were; of Rousseau’s “State of Nature” where savages roamed in scant loincloths without a care in the world; and of paradise lost like Milton’s foreboding of a utopia now crumbling into the dystopian paragon of untruths and Orwell’s misinformation where totalitarianism becomes the choice of self-immolation.

As Being cannot mean anything without its opposite, Nothingness, so is it not the trials of life that magnify and make relevant the joy felt on any given day?  Can one truly exist without the other?

And yet we attempt to minimize and diminish the latter in thinking that we deserve the former.  But as the inane philosopher now long forgotten once stated with annoyance and greater impertinence, “It is what it is”.  Whatever that means.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are experiencing the “trials” period of one’s life because of a medical condition that prevents the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, the attempt to jump over and across the great divide so that one can get back to the “joy” part of life’s offerings by trying to “work with” the Federal agency or Postal service, or to “seek an accommodation” with one’s Federal department or Postal facility, there is another proverbial adage that comes to mind: “Banging one’s head up against the wall.”

It is often the case, unfortunately, that in order to get from the “trials” to the “joy” part of life, the Federal or Postal employee will have to prepare, formulate and file an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee wants to or not.

For, in the end, the truth of the matter is, the “trials” part of life is something you have little or no control over – such as a medical condition; it is only the “joy” part of the deal that you can assert some dominance over: by taking the affirmative steps to file an OPM Disability Retirement application.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement: Organizing the apocalypse

The apocalypse, by definition, has no future.  Whether by biblical reference, or in a generic sense where the foreseen event entails such proportions of catastrophic immensity, the concept itself is beyond the grasp of human comprehension.  It is where Being becomes non-existent, and the existential contrast of the conceptual puzzle encompassing Nothingness is somehow attempted to be understood, if only within the limited means of linguistic expression.

Poetry cannot abide the meaning; prose can barely describe its repose; and human thought is unable to grapple with the vicious circularity of its conundrum:  to comprehend it is to consider its very converse; to think upon the inversion is to extinguish all conceptual paradigms.  It is an act of self-immolation, where the devouring of one’s own flesh must by necessity occur in order to stave off the pangs of starvation, but where each bite merely ensures the death of the guarantor of life.

That is what Malraux touches upon when his characters discuss the self-contradiction of revolutionary movements; the very people who initiate such explosions can never be the ones who continue the implosions following; for, it is the breed itself which cannot remain in order to build.  By their very nature, the destructive forces must themselves disappear, lest the cannibalization of such extinguishment is the intended goal, which is never considered unless anarchy and dystopia are the ends sought.

We often think that those who are compelled by causes which history, in its visionary retrospective insights, can remain to maintain stability and administration of the revolutionary idea; but Mao proved otherwise, and the haunting bones of Cuba’s leaders where poverty, desecration of abandoned ideas and fading combat khakis declare to us that we wish Mick Jagger never came out of retirement.

There is, in every epic of historical proportions, a loss of meaning whenever the cause has been attained, and that is the natural course of life.  The question thus becomes:  Once the pinnacle is reached, what does one do?  In microcosms of life and smallness of living within the spectacle of the common man, the issue that remains and looms amidst is, How to organize the apocalypse.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents one from continuing in one’s chosen Federal or Postal career or vocation of financial stability, the fact that one must end one’s Federal or Postal career early is akin to an apocalypse, where hope is no longer a goal to endure.  That being a fact of irrefutable and irreversible content which arrives at a point of incontrovertible reality, the issue remaining which must be considered is, How do I rationally organize this apocalypse?

Preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is often the first step in ensuring that the metaphorical “revolution” which brings about a change uncalled for, like the wave of a historical sweep in epic battles of mankind’s folly, comes about in a rational, organized and steadfast manner, such that we are not left behind like the haunting whispers of Mao’s Cultural Revolutions or the stale cigar smoke from Castro’s toothless grin, where history laughs in the dark corridors of forgotten tombstones overrun with the swallowing of earth’s grief.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Medical Retirement: Recalibrating the Reset Button

Preparing for life’s vicissitudes can be a daunting task.  Some never acquire the skills necessary to accommodate the winds of misdirection; others stumble through like a drunken sailor walking down fate’s gangplank, seeing the end but failing to adapt in time to prevent the calamities forewarned.  The very few somehow manage to engage the transformation, like a chameleon who responds to the surrounding environment by becoming invisible within the subtleties of life.

Change is the inevitable essence of life.  From alterations occurring from growth — from birth to adulthood, then to aging decay — to the physical universe of constant transformation; the world is represented by the various metaphors and symbols of permanence and change, of Yin and Yang, of Parmenides and Heraclitus, and in modernity, of the recalibration of the reset button.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who find themselves with a medical condition which impacts the Federal or Postal employee’s ability and capacity to continue in his or her present career, it is precisely that fear of change which precludes one from engaging in the necessary steps required to adapt, transform, and reset.

If insanity is defined as performing acts of failure repetitively, then the world must by definition be insane, and the Federal or Postal employee who continues down the same path despite all of the headwinds and warning signs present, should be placed in a straightjacket and confined to the halls of antiseptic whitewashed rooms.  Change is always difficult; but it is a necessity of life.  It is the life spring of a vibrant community; and its opposite is a parallel universe of decay, decrepit degradation, and destructive degeneration of death and desperate deterioration (and so, why is the alliteration of negation so rampant with the letter “d”?).

Filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management for the Federal or Postal employee under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset is a step in a changing direction.  It takes the Federal and Postal employee out from the insanity of repetitive failure by allowing for a recalibration of the requisite reset button, and to potentially engage in a future which leaves behind a past replete with hostility and increasingly adverse attitudes.  It secures a base annuity such that one can survive; then, allows for the Federal or Postal employee to work in the private sector and make up to 80% of what one’s former position currently pays.

As change is necessary to the survival of any organism, so stagnation is the result of resistance to transformation; and like the putrid waters of stillness filled with microorganisms waiting to destroy the abdominal walls of the unsuspecting traveler, the Federal or Postal employee who refuses to recalibrate the reset button is merely waiting for the day when the external order will force the change involuntarily, as opposed to he who chooses the day, time and moment of an inevitable fate which awaits us all.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement Lawyer: Preemptive Actions

Knowledge can be a dangerous commodity; partial, or little knowledge, can be all the more damaging, precisely because actions can result based upon incomplete information and slices of factually curtailed composites.

The Court of the Appeals for the Federal Circuit has previously pointed out one of the methodological deficiencies engaged in by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in its review and determination of Federal Disability Retirement cases:  of focusing upon that which is not included in a Federal Disability Retirement application, as opposed to reviewing the information of what has been received.

Such a distinction may be a subtle one, and a difference which can be easily overlooked, but it reveals much more than mere word-play.  For, what it manifests is an application of a criteria based upon an erroneous assumption, and one which continues to be applied to this day, despite case-law which admonishes OPM to the contrary.

Vanieken-Ryals v. OPM, a 2007 Federal Court of Appeals case, points out the error of OPM’s ways in Federal Disability Retirement cases, where insistence upon “objective” medical evidence continues to dominate, despite the lack of such requirement to the contrary.  Such an issue is especially relevant, of course, in cases where psychiatric medical conditions prevail, and when OPM insists upon the lack of such “objective” medical evidence where none can be obtained, it leads to Federal and Postal employees to react desperately in a preemptively unreasonable frenzy of actions.

Not knowing the law is one thing; knowing, but deliberately ignoring it, is quite another.  But the price Federal and Postal employees pay for when a bureaucracy engages in practices which clearly defy the clear mandate of legal requirement, results in preemptive actions which ultimately lead to another day in Court, to argue that which one thought was previously already established.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Medical Retirement Lawyer: Drawers and Other Hideaways

Whether cabinets and chests were created for neatness of housekeeping, or to bifurcate the clutter of consciousness, should be left up to anthropologists and social commentators.  Facebook, too, and Social Media, the inability to resist adding to the clatter and superficiality of what we say, what we collect, and how we amass, both information and items we choose to gather; does it all reveal the historical backdrop of the Mesozoic era, from whence we all originate?

We are all, ultimately, left to the devices of our own unmaking and insufficiencies; and that which we neatly hide in drawers of convenience, and close, become tantamount to sealing our fate when once we conceal that which needs to be maintained.

Federal Disability Retirement is a benefit which Federal and Postal workers seek to obtain, when a medical need arises and the medical condition, injury or trauma begins to impact one’s ability and capacity to perform all of the essential elements of one’s positional duties with a Federal Agency or the U.S. Postal Service.  Once obtained, the Letter of Approval received from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, often declares to the (now former) Federal or Postal employee, that a linear process from start to finish has now been concluded.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Like cars and children, maintaining the sufficiency and viability of an ongoing Federal Disability Retirement benefit is as important as the effort expended to win an approval.  And, like the car which needs a periodic oil change in order to extend the life of the internal mechanical apparatus by an exponential multiple, so the quality of effort needed to retain and maintain a Federal Disability Retirement benefit is minimal and uncomplicated; but necessary.

For Federal employees and Postal workers, whether under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, the cost of continuing care of one’s Federal Disability Retirement benefit, once achieved, should never be cast out of mind and consciousness; and rather than neatly setting it aside in some drawer or other hideaway, it should remain on full display in the centrality of one’s livelihood, lest the mice, goblins and other unwelcome creatures begin to gnaw at the ripeness of one’s Federal Disability Retirement benefit.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire