Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Going It Alone

Perhaps the maverick wins, or dies while trying and is buried anonymously in an unmarked grave; or the soldier who leaves his platoon and attempts to go behind enemy lines to save his buddies; or in a city of millions, a lonely heart who yearns for mere company but is too shy to even try.

Going it alone is a lonely proposition; it invites a sense of isolation, separation, abandonment and irrelevance; for some, it is a mark of courage; and for others, a mere trifle of the fool.  Perhaps there are times when it is appropriate to “going it alone”; for the most part, however, in this day and age of expertise and specialization, it is necessary to consult the advice, counsel and guidance of knowledgeable sources.

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, going it alone is often an unwise and inadvisable approach in preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Consult with a Federal Disability Retirement Lawyer and consider whether or not investing in your future is a worthwhile endeavor, and whether “Going it Alone” is an act resulting from an intelligent decision, or a fleeting thought best left to Shakespeare’s Fool.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement under FERS: The “Right” Way

There are many ways to do things.  Often enough, we have heard our parents say gently, “Yes, you can do it that way, but the better way is…”.  The increasing superlatives — “good”, “better”, “best” — are like the houses in the story of the Three Little Pigs, of the house that was made of straw; the one constructed of sticks; and the last one, of bricks.

Can we say that all three were “good” houses?  It depends, one supposes — upon the utility, the comfort, and the “reason” behind why and what the house was built for.  As a matter of mere location for sleep and comfort, one could argue that any of the three homes were adequate.  If, however, as the story unfolded and revealed, for protection from predators, then there was indeed only one which was the “right” one — the one constructed of bricks.

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 is important to prepare, formulate and file a Federal Disability Retirement application in the “right” way.  Yes, there are many ways to do it, but in the end, the sequence of how one formulates and puts together a FERS Disability Retirement application is, indeed, the “best” and “right” way.

Consult with a Federal Attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law and begin the process of preparing your Federal Disability Retirement case in the “right” way.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Retirement for Mental or Physical Incapacity: Citing cases

The strength of a case is not further reinforced by the mere citing of legal precedents; rather, it is the use of the substantive application that makes for persuasive argumentation.  Often, cases are cited in a dizzying plethora of listings, of names and titles of legal opinions amassed in greater paragraphs of listings to impress upon the garnered support of the legal opinions allegedly providing for an unsurmountable wall of irrefutable authority; but upon further inspection, many of the cases are merely regurgitations of prior opinions and precedents, and add nothing to the substantive force of the point trying to be made.

Good things are “good” because of the goodness within them, but when one begins to believe that “goodness” comes not from the element of goodness but from the quantity instead of the quality, then we all fall into the self-contradictory trap of utilitarianism, where we fail to recognize that too much of something destroys the very goodness engendered by the good.

Just ask the kid who ate a gallon of ice cream and sat on the toilet seat for an hour with a stomach ache — whether ice cream taken to meeting one’s imagination of what heaven encompasses is still “good” in quantities that have no limitations.

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 process of amassing the complex information in order to “argue” one’s Federal Disability Retirement application should, at a minimum, include the citing of “basic” cases found in “The Law”.

This is necessary in order to reinforce the justification that one’s Federal Disability Retirement application is supported by the legal precedents that have held sway for decades on end.  Citing cases is important; citing the right cases is even more important; citing the relevant cases is very important; citing the relevant and significant cases and arguing as to why they are being cited — now, that is the most important approach of all.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Attorney Representation Federal Disability Retirement: Quiet

Is “quiet” the same as silence?  Or, of lack of noise?  Is it a state of mind-body consonance, where the body can remain calm and unmoving, yet the mind remains racing with thoughts, and in that state of being, do we fool ourselves to think that the outer world will not impact the inner mind?  Or, in reverse order?

Quiet is that which we strive for, in a world where din is the normalcy of life.  Can medical conditions that betray that which we strive for be understood by those who do not experience it?

Consider Tinnitus – that condition where there is a constant “sound”, whether of ringing, hissing or clanging that disrupts any consistency of a person’s striving for quiet, and this, despite everyone else in the “objective” world being quite oblivious to the “hearing” of such sounds.  Or, of the person who is deaf or progressively losing one’s acoustic acuity – can the rest of the world understand such a state of reality?

We assume, as we operate throughout the world on a daily basis, that because others appear to act in similar ways, that their inner beings and states of minds are similarly situated.  To “think alike” is to remain comfortable; and to attain “quiet” is not just to avoid the constant rush of living, but to reach a plateau where life is consistent, predictable and somewhat boring.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who experience the disquietude of a medical condition, where a combination of multiple factors come to the fore: Of a medical condition that prevents one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal positional duties; of “noises” from one’s agency, supervisors and managers of deficiencies in performance, attendance or quota goals; of being placed upon a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP); of receiving a “warning” memorandum concerning one’s use of leave, whether Sick, Annual or LWOP; of harassment even when one has invoked FMLA rights; or of the step just prior to the last one – a proposed termination, then a termination; it may be time to prepare, formulate and file an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be ultimately submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.

“Quiet” is not just a state of how things are in one’s home; one can lose that goal of quiet by bringing home the stresses of work’s harassment and adversarial environment, and it doesn’t have to be an actual medical condition such as Tinnitus or progressive deafness – although those may also be a qualifying basis upon which to file a Federal Disability Retirement application – but multiple other medical conditions, as well, that result in the disquiet of robbing one’s quiet.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement Benefits: ‘Can’ and ‘Have to’

The category of the latter has diminished in recent years, as the general populace has mistakenly misinterpreted the distinctive definitions of liberty and freedom, and reassigned meanings as license and anarchy.  The blank column of the former concept has come to be full, despite the reality of the economic downturn and the shift into a global economy that, we are told, is an inevitable consequence of human progress.

We were taught that the march of progress required the destruction of the American West, where a way of life needed to be trampled upon and destroyed in the name of advancement and civilization; that each step of innovation and progressive paradigms constitute an almost Hegelian fatefulness, and resistance is merely an act of futility within the aggregation of the Leviathan called “Progress”.  The modern parlance consists in the acceptance of every innovation of technology, to the extent that Orwell’s dystopian premonitions have been surpassed by a reality now accepted as mundane and commonplace, and we fail to realize that his magnum opus of a totalitarian future could have been heeded, but now is merely embraced with a yawn and barely a glance backward.

The more that society comes to believe in that which we ‘can’, as opposed to the obligatory mandate of ‘have to’, the less likely is there of a resistance to authority.  And, until the police raid in the middle of the night or the unquestioned stop and search on a highway where others just whiz by without puzzlement or curiosity, is experienced personally by a given individual, the onerous nature of laws passed in the name of safety, security and preventative measures, will be merely a conceptual haze masked by an obscure hypothetical.

Instead, we live day-to-day in the conundrum of being told that we ‘can’ do what we want, desire and fantasize about, and there is little that we ‘have to’ do.  Thus do infidelity and divorces occur; of abandonment of family ties based upon tropes of scintillating sensations; and goals set aside in the namesake of present pleasures.

There is a category of individuals, however, where the luxury of ‘can’ cannot be replaced by mere want of ‘have to’ – a person with a medical condition.  For Federal and 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 ‘can’ once relied upon transforms into an inability.

Once the inability to perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal position becomes a reality, then the ‘have to’ is finally realized – of preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.  Do not let the muddle of incessant trope involving ‘can’ become confused with ‘have to’ – for, when one comes to a point of ‘must’, it is time to prepare, formulate and file an effective Federal Employee Disability Retirement application.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: The wrong target

What if you are involved in the highest levels of competitive marksmanship – say, target shooting by a rifle, or crossbow, or bow and arrow, or even by a pistol.  You shot throughout the morning, and hit the bulls eye every time; your opponents try to keep up with you, but at each level of competition, there is a slight deviation here, a centimeter there, and systematically, the competition is “eliminated”, and you are left standing at the podium of the “winner”.

As the trophy is brought out, the Chief Judge who is about to present the awards and ceremonial crown, pauses, reflects for a moment, and declares:  “Sorry, but it turns out that you were shooting at the wrong target each time.”  They then present the accolades to the “runner up”, who was shooting on the same range, aiming at each turn at the target set up in his or her respective lane of sightings, and seemed to follow the protocol as set up by the competition and the committee of judges.

You go and question the judgment of the judges, and especially address the Chief Judge, protesting:  “What do you mean?  I shot at the target that was set up.”  “But you shot at the wrong target.  Your target was the one in the lane next to you.  You shot in Lane A; you were supposed to be in Lane B”.  And you argue:  “But that is irrelevant.  Lane A is the same as Lane B, and there is no difference between the two.”  And the Chief Judge says:  “Look at your designated Card Assignment:  It states without question, ‘Assigned to Lane A’.  Yet, you shot all targets in Lane B”.  You persist in arguing:  “But what difference does it make?  It is the same target whether I am in Lane A or Lane B?”  And the kicker from the Chief Judge:  “In life, you can’t just do what you want; you have to obey the rules.”

Who is right?  Would it matter which lane one is assigned to, and whether obedience to the protocol and adherence to the “letter of the law” is followed, when the substantive point of the whole process – hitting the target – is clearly accomplished beyond the competence of all others?  We often encounter that anomaly in life – of the seeming conflict between the technicality of the issue (the “minutiae” otherwise unnoticed by the rest of the population) and the general adherence based upon common knowledge and boredom of repetitive protocol.  It may well be a trite redundancy, but when a “technicality” is involved, then a technician is the one to call.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are considering filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, the question of the “wrong target” and the “technical violation” of the rules is appropriate to recognize and consider:  For, in Federal Disability Retirement Law, as in many other facets of legal wrangling, making sure that the larger compass of hitting the “right” target, as well as keeping within the proper lane of technical legal issues, are both equally important in preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

The “wrong target” is the agency; the “right target” is the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.  The “technicalities” encompass the statutes, laws, regulations and legal opinions as rendered by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board and the Federal Circuit Courts on issues pertaining to Federal Disability Laws litigated as precedents.  And, who is the proper “technician” to call?  An attorney who is experienced in fighting the cause for Federal and Postal employees, to obtain Federal Disability Retirement benefits.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Federal Employee Disability Retirement: A traveler’s perspective

How is it that a tourist can see the same building which local people pass by every day, as something of an attraction worthy of encapsulating and embalming for posterity’s sake, with a click of the camera?  What is it about the eye of the traveler which is different from the staid repetitiveness of the citizen occupying for decades, centuries, and eons long forgotten, which challenges the uniqueness of stability and contrasts it as against the unwanted forces of change?

Like tectonic shifts, mass migrations armed with Smartphones and caravans of conscious interests move about like little mini-quakes barely discernible; Europeans fly to the New World; the Americans travel to Asia, Europe and beyond; then, at the end of it all, excepting those ex-patriots who are hounded for their untaxed outlays, everyone marches home to the warmth of intimacy and familiarity, where security of the known overrides the curiosity of the unseen.

Parables abound about the unwary one who enters into the strangeness of the foreign land; most reveal the welcoming hand of courtesy, hospitality and the receptiveness of presumed brevity.  Modernity defies such intercourse of comforting eyes; a seemingly abandoned piece of luggage no longer results in a frantic search for its owner, but a call to armed inspection and mechanical robots with detonation devices and close circuit monitoring to sniff out the contents of deadly emissions.

If doors can no longer welcome the weary traveler, what hope is there in mankind?  It was but for the door seen uniquely, the fountain forgotten of its historical eminence, the cornerstone marked for the brief encounter with revolution, and the lost etchings down voiceless corridors where the figure of foreign accents once dominated but where now the laughter of innocence peeks down dusty pathways of trodden sights that matter to each of us.

Where is that uniqueness of a traveler’s eye, when dangers thought to lurk in airports everywhere and bus stops no longer congregate with greetings to strangers and small tidbits of conversational reminiscences dot the quietude of breaths icily frozen in the morning mist of a cold winter’s day?  We have lost that capacity to welcome, that narrative of embracing, and instead have replaced it with the cynicism of modernity.

For the Federal employee or U.S. Postal worker who is contemplating filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management because of an ongoing medical condition, the feelings felt must be likened to that modern-day traveler who re-enters his own neighborhood, and finds the suspicion and decay insinuated by strange lands to have infiltrated and invaded one’s own place of abode.  For, it is the difference displayed by the medical condition which results in the treatment by coworkers, supervisors and the Federal agency or the U.S. Postal Service, to suddenly treat the neighbor next door as a suspicious traveler hitherto unknown or unfamiliar.

When that peculiar feeling grows in ponderous weights no longer tolerable, it is time to prepare, formulate and file an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset; for, in the end, a traveler’s perspective is no different than the Federal or Postal employee who must exit from one’s own career because the comfort of a once-familiar workplace has become a cauldron of fear and angst.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: The perfection of nothingness

The advantage of nothingness over the clutter of everything is that the former – despite lacking any characteristic of anything concrete, or perhaps because of it – retains and reflects an aura of perfection.  It is perhaps a puzzle to consider perfection in that which represents vacuity, but think about it:  It is the figment and filament of negation which can represent the penultimate artifice of unsullied brightness; everything that is in being, can be found fault with, but nothing that exists cannot be prosecuted for imperfection.

That is why Anselm’s Ontological Argument for God’s existence is so deliciously irrelevant:  lacking any “real-world” content, the irrefutable perfection of its linguistic construct allows us to believe with such irredeemable faith in the a priori nature untouched and unable to be deconstructed in a world where everything is otherwise unmasked as either superficial, virtual or unreal.

The prefatory acceptance of the major premise – “That than which nothing greater can be thought of” – is itself of such irrelevant tripe (the substantive reference to the content, not the animal’s innards) that we involuntarily warm our hands and lick our lips before pouncing with predatory glee upon such sophomoric tropes (easy to exchange the “i” for an “o”).  And then we turn to our projects, as Heidegger would describe, in order to forget the unmasked and unveiled reality of our present concerns, because procrastination is the epitome of acknowledging our unmanageable souls and lives of decrepit conduct unlike the angels of yore.

There is nothing but imagination to feed our tired souls, anymore.  This isn’t even a “postmodern” world; instead, it is a “post-cynical” world.  We have unmasked every hero, dissected anything of value, and demeaned all content and reduced it all to mere materialism.  The only thing left for us to elevate to a heightened sense of ecstasy is nothingness itself.  Only if it survives in the corridors of our own minds and creative imaginations, can it be considered perfection.  For, in the real world, nothing that is of value can be trusted, and everything else remains but nothingness.

That is why, for the Federal or Postal employee who continues to procrastinate his or her Federal Disability Retirement filing, the perfection of nothingness often remains as the final hint of hope.  For, so long as one never tries, one can never fail.  Perfection in the security of not, is the epitome of safety.  By failing to file and remaining miserable in the pain and agony of one’s medical condition, the hope of future filing remains as the hint of hope for the future.  But the problem with such an approach – as with Anselm’s argument for the existence of God – is that we live in a world of real pain, real deterioration, and real destiny.

Preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application by the Federal or Postal employee requires a “next step” forward in order to move beyond the perfection of nothingness.

In the trite parlance of ongoing modernity, there is never anything gained if nothing is attempted, but for the Federal employee or U.S. Postal worker who suffers 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 positional duties, the agony of continuing in a job which is self-destructive, is by its very nature an admission that perfecting that artifice of nothingness is nothing more than delaying the reality of an uncertain future where the perfection of nothingness will gain nothing more than the reality of nothingness, which is nothing to hope for.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire