FERS Disability Law: Falling Through the Cracks

Where did that phrase originate from?  It often refers to small things slipping through without getting noticed because of their insignificance, whether because of size or lack of notoriety.  Children who lack popularity are often thought to be in danger of falling through the cracks — of not being given their due attention; of being ignored; of failing to be noticed.

The amazing thing is that we ever even notice it at all; for, by and large, most of us fall into the category of enforced anonymity — of being in danger of falling through the cracks.  Whether you are the “star” of the class or the “appointed one” whose every move is ooh-ed and ahhh-ed — most everyone else is of the ordinary ilk, unnoticed, ignored or otherwise already having fallen through the cracks.

Federal employees who suffer from a medical condition fall into that category — of either having fallen through the cracks, or about to fall through the cracks.  This is because the medical condition itself relegates the Federal and Postal employee into the category of the “outcast” — of those who have fallen through the cracks.

Contact a FERS attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law, and see whether or not you might qualify to fall through the cracks of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and land upon the other side where you can become a Federal Disability Retirement annuitant, where falling through the cracks will allow you to prioritize your life and focus upon the more important elements of a life of health and well-being.

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.

 

OPM Disability Retirement Application: In the Modern Age

Are there greater problems today than there were before?  Are there more bad people; is there a greater number of sexual predators; do people on the whole act with greater aberrance than in times past?

Of course, much of such questions depends upon what you define as “before” — as in, what historical time period, which civilization as the comparative reference point, and are we applying the same acts committed (i.e., apples-to-apples), etc.

In the modern age, is there more stress in the workplace?  Are psychiatric conditions worse and more prevalent because of the increase in workplace hostility and stressful conditions?  Is there a better way to keep and retain productive members of the workforce — i.e., to accommodate them — than to provide them with a disability annuity?

In the modern age, the level of workplace stress has, indeed, seemingly increased, to a rate and frequency where devastation of lives occurs in greater numbers than before.  Before — as in, when?  Such a question is an irrelevancy.  The modern age has no equivalence, and therefore no comparative analysis can be wrought.  Instead, the proper focus is to fight for one’s rights and one’s benefits.

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 position, contact a qualified OPM Lawyer who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law.

For, in the modern age, there exist laws which provide for alleviation from the medical devastation wrought by society’s undue workplace stresses, and asserting one’s disability rights is fortunately a benefit available in the modern age.

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.

 

Filing for FERS Disability Retirement: The identity of choice

In the end, do we?  That is — do we have a choice when it comes to our identity?  Of course, in this day and age where word-play has become completely malleable, and where Truth and Falsity rarely matter except when tested against the exigencies of the objective universe (i.e., as when crossing a street and someone says, “Be careful, a bus is coming”, and you suddenly realize that the truth or falsity of such a statement can actually have real-life consequences), the question becomes: How does one define one’s use of the word, “identity”?  Is it based upon the aggregation of objective and subjective statements, beliefs, opinions and perspectives?

In other words, are we merely the compendium of cumulative voices based upon: Our birth certificate; the driver’s license in our wallets; the memories retained by our parents, grandparents and relatives; how our friends view us; what our spouses believe us to be; what the neighborhood dogs recalls from sniffing at our feet — the cumulative aggregation of all of such factors?  Is who we are — our “identity” — different from who we believe we are?  If everyone believes X to be such-and-such but X believes himself to be a secret agent working for a mysterious foreign entity, what (or who) determines the reality of our identity?  Or, is “identity” based upon the collective perspective of a community that “knows” that individual?  Can we “choose’ our identity, and if so, completely or only partially?

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition where the medical condition begins to impact one’s ability and capacity to continue to work in one’s Federal or Postal job, there is often a concomitant “identity crisis” that accompanies the medical condition.  No longer are you the stellar worker for the Federal Agency; no longer are you the reliable provider who slogs through the daily toil as a Postal employee; instead, your identity is one of having a medical condition that limits, prevents, subverts or otherwise alters the way in which you live.

Filing for FERS Disability Retirement becomes an alternative that must be chosen, and that “choice” may alter who you are and what others may think about you.  But in the end, you do have a choice: The essence of who you are remains always within; the identity of choice is not altered merely because you file for a benefit that must be pursued because of a medical condition that was incurred through no fault of your own; and anyone who thinks otherwise never knew you to begin with.  For, in the end, the identity of choice was and remains always within the purview and power within each of us; we just didn’t know it.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Lawyer Representation for OPM Disability Claims: Foregone conclusions

There are many; some, within the universe of a greater subset, are perennial by nature, and can never be altered but for some miracle yet to be considered (like the fact that the Baltimore Orioles will have ended its season sometime by early June of each year); others, of a more generic knowledge, assumed and forever predictable, ever to be presumed as a law of nature (as in, somewhere in the world a war will be started within the next year, or that a child will be born, or even that a medical condition will impact someone, somewhere).

Foregone conclusions are tidbits of knowledge gained from experience of life; and where the cynic will declare that they establish the circularity of repetitive reality that cannot be avoided or ignored, the idealist will counter that miracles and exceptions may yet prove otherwise such that what was presumed to be a conclusion is never foregone but merely imagined.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who harbor thoughts of foregone conclusions based upon the deteriorating health of one’s present circumstances — that you will be “fired”; that the PIP imposed will inevitably lead to termination; that filing a Federal Disability Retirement application with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset will be defeated by one’s own Agency or the U.S. Postal Service — remember that it is up to the sole determination of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and not one’s Agency or the Postmaster of one’s Postal Facility.

All Federal and Postal Disability Retirement applications are submitted to OPM, and one’s own Federal Agency or the Postal Service can only have limited influence upon the viability and persuasive effect of a Federal Disability Retirement application.  Where there is a will to fight and an objective basis in which to file a Federal Disability Retirement application, it is never a foregone conclusion that there is not a chance for a successful outcome.

Now, as for those Orioles’ fans who think that there is hope for next year…well, you must truly be an idealist to avoid the foregone conclusion that, yes, the sun will rise again tomorrow, and set yet again later, but a season’s end that began in early May is not a great indicator of next year’s beginning.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement: The Trail of Tears

History is replete with the metaphor of maltreatment; it is the silent graves that cannot speak, anymore, which haunts a nation’s soul.  It is a reminder, of sorts; a way of understanding and revisiting the history and essence of a nation – of the westward expansion and the decimation and systematic thievery against a civilization that was doomed from the start.  But trails soon get overrun by either settlements or city construction; and tears quickly dry up so that the agony of a peoples once felt become a mere memory told in narratives and tales by old men and forgotten women who no longer matter.

Reservations were demarcated and a defeated populace was shuttled into forgotten corners of the world, left to sputter amongst themselves in wallowing memories of defeated battles and violated treaties; and, as modernity replaced the fading residue of an inglorious past, only the diaries and annotations of eyewitnesses maintained a memory of coherent violations otherwise set aside to make room for future time.  Does each one of us, in addition, have a trail of tears?  Do we shed them in the privacy of our scorned thoughts, left to the isolation of our own destroyed lives?

The Medicine Man of yore could not stop the onslaught of that which we deem “progress” and “modernity”; and in the end, it was modern warfare that doomed any resistance to change.  The medical doctor of today, like the appeals of yesteryear to the Great Spirit, can only stem the tide of a progressive and chronic disease; the methodology may have changed, from fasting and foreboding fortunetelling to pharmacological modalities and surgical intervention, but when a diseased body or mind continues to deteriorate despite such intercession, the personal trail of tears follows a parallel course of those we once trampled upon.

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 position, it may be time to consider preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

There are always historical travesties, as well as personal ones.  In this world where history barely catches the fancy of those who must contend with the tides of an uncaring world, it is the personal trail of tears which is most important to each individual, and not the “grand scheme” of events which we can neither control nor foresee.

History is what it is – acts committed by ancestors, certainly, but ones which most of us could neither control nor protest against.  But that which we can determine – like the destiny of a future for a Federal or Postal worker who must contend with a medical condition that continues to debilitate and constrain – should be accomplished within the confines of the laws which predominate, lest one’s personal trail of tears begins to parallel that of a past now long forgotten.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Disability Retirement for Federal Employees: Understanding

The Master asks one of his two dogs, “Where is ___?”  If the second pet wags her tail, looks quizzically at the owner, then proceeds to go to the far end of the next room and locates the wandering misfit and barks to you that she has found him – do we disbelieve?  If the same question were to be asked of one’s child in reference to a sibling, and the identical result occurs where the first child goes into another room or runs up into the attic and locates the lost soul, would there be any doubt?

Same circumstances, identical behaviors, concurrent results; merely different mammals within the genus of species, and yet we disbelieve because of arrogance and pride of self-worth.  Why is it that we refuse to attribute understanding to non-human entities despite clear evidence to the contrary?  Is language defined by grammatical rules of construction retrospectively applied, and does that constitute a basis for refusing to allow admittance into the colony of intelligence “clubs” of exclusivity we have created based upon rules of comprehension we have paradoxically constructed?

The rules constituting grammatical comprehension and technical application came subsequent to language itself; for, no one believes that Man sat down eons ago and decided to set down rules of linguistic conveyance, upon which the growing population then began to follow.  No, conformity to such constricting paradigms were initiated, instituted and concretized when society recognized that there were differences in parochial intonations, and those who had nothing better to do decided with arrogance and ivory-tower nose-lifting that correct idioms of speech needed to be recognized, applied and adhered to.

And what of animals?  So long as the working paradigm consisted of our self-image as just below the angels and above the burdens of beasts, we refused their eligibility to the elite of elasticity in language and comprehension.  Yet, despite all of the convoluted attempts at avoiding acknowledgment and recognition that “to understand” is nothing more than the behavior following an utterance of speech, the pragmatism of daily life refutes our own methodology of exclusionary conduct.  For, in the end, it is merely the impact of speech upon behavior in a given society, whether that indicates a “human” world or a “dog” universe.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are 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, the question of “understanding” before “acting” often becomes a vicious circularity resulting in non-action:  The complexity of the legal tangles in Federal Disability Retirement law tends to make the Federal or Postal employee pause; failure to act in preparing, formulating and filing a Federal Disability Retirement application serves to exacerbate one’s condition, which leads to greater stress and turmoil; non-action results.

The key is to recognize that “understanding” – not even “complete understanding” – is necessary.  Rather, it is often the subsequent initiation of acting following a verbal commitment that is the only real test of understanding.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

FERS & CSRS Federal Employee Disability Retirement Benefits: Examples

What if we never grew up with any?  Is it not by metaphor and analogy that we all escape the citadel of ivory towers and the dangers of glass barriers and unseen traumas?  They tell us that the early years of “imprint” are crucial for stability, development and self-discipline against asocial behaviors; yet, even after the crucial years following the correlation subsequent to the first encounter with the world, and just before the turmoil of puberty and into adulthood, there are indicators that failure of examples to take hold can still be corrected in order to prevent the ghastly concretization of personality misfits, where pathological deviancy may yet be avoided.

Are examples important?  Like paradigms upon which theories are tested, and foundations that gird the architectural integrity of a high rise, they provide the basis and essence of a personality otherwise left to miscreants of changing winds and altering tides.  Tectonic shifts in the undersea of the human soul can bring out the tidal waves of cruelty and conduct unbecoming; parents hope that the midnight call from the sheriff’s office is not a reflection of any apparent failure, or the alluring eyes of guilt and condemnation when asked how the toddler learned it, and the babbling mouth which emits the torrent of shivering fright:  “My parents taught me.”

Yet, negation and trepidation of containment just so that one’s own reputation will not be sullied, are often wanting.  To “not” engage in examples of bad exemplars is merely a negation of purpose, and fails to address the positive requirement of that which an example entails.  For, negation of a positive mandate merely leaves one with a nothingness in a world of meaning where there is a plenitude of bad examples.  Not providing the positive input will merely allow for innocence to be tattered and jostled; for, where there is a vacuum, the desire to fill and load will come from influences unwanted and unwelcomed.

In a society where there is no mechanism for generational transfer of wisdom, the young are at the mercy of the whims of those who lurk in corners of bestiality and congregations of cultish canopies; there is no such thing as innocence, anymore – just stupidity clothed as symbols to be desecrated.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management “for the first time”  — how often is there a subsequent event?  — Such an act of preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits is always Act I, Scene I of the end of one’s Federal or Postal career.  As it occurs in the first introduction to one’s life-play, there are no “examples” to follow; except, perhaps, to consult with an attorney who is experienced in matters of Federal Disability Retirement law.

As such, where there is failure of a newborn’s imprint, and no paradigms of prodigies to follow, the effective preparation in a Federal Disability Retirement application, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS of CSRS Offset, may well be in seeking the advice and counsel of an example set by a person who has previously avoided the pitfalls and obstacles of such a complex administrative and bureaucratic endeavor.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire