OPM Disability Retirement Legal Advice and Guidance: Addressing and Rebutting

Much of lawyering is artistry, as opposed to science.  As discretion is to experience, so choosing which issues to address is a matter of instinct and judgment based upon past experience.

There are those in life who are “bulls in a china shop” — an old adage which refers to people who just barrel through without considering the consequences.  Another familiar saying is: “Discretion is the better part of valor”, which can mean many things and contains some nuances, but essentially refers to judgment of action in the face of issues to be confronted.

We no longer live in the middle ages where knights and other warriors engage in duels and valor-filled defenses of honor, but the saying itself can still be relevant in terms of discretionary judgments as to which battles to confront, which wars to engage and when to retreat, or leave “well enough alone”.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers contemplating filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the number of issues to tackle — whether preemptively at the First Stage of the process, or in rebuttal form at the Reconsideration (Second) Stage, or even before an MSPB Judge at the Third Stage of the Process — is overwhelming.

Addressing and Rebutting each and every one is almost impossible, but nevertheless must be done.  How is it done?  By breaking down the complex into the simple, into manageable numbers, then addressing the overall issues and rebutting by citing the relevant case-law.

Addressing and Rebutting — the two ends of a bookcase which constitute the essence of a winning argument.  Contact an OPM Disability Retirement Attorney who specializes in Federal Medical Retirement Law, and make sure to address and rebut the legal and medical major issues in every Federal Disability Retirement case.

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 Government Employee Disability Retirement: Trials

There are many of them; and whether used in the general sense of “trials in life”, or in the more technical sense of the dramas taking place all across the courtrooms of every country and nation, the meaning behind the term amounts to the same: the challenge of overcoming adversity; the encounter with and resolution of conflict; the intimidation of people and events; the facing of an unpleasant reality.

Life can never to lived without it; for, the very definition of a human life can be summed up in a single word: Trials.

Life is a series of them; and whether you characterize each as a “problem” or as a “challenge”, it is the difference between having a pessimistic outlook upon the world, or of the more bright-eyed view of the optimist.  Trials are what either form the character, or destroy the individual in the process.

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 and career, consult with an OPM Disability Attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law, lest the trials of life’s misgivings defeat the very purpose of the trial itself: To win, to overcome, to defeat the opposition; and then to move on in life.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

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

 

Legal Representation on Federal Disability Retirement Claims: The simple life

We all crave it; most of us dream of it; some try to implement it.  The “simple” life is the one that runs throughout the cultural history of Americana; from those days of Walden’s Pond and the life proposed by Thoreau and the transcendentalists, to the hippie communes in the Sixties and the movement back to agrarian life of more recent vintage, the desire to “downsize”, simplify and go back to the harkening calls of less complexity, less technology and less everything has always remained throughout.

Yet, “simple” does not mean “easy”, and one has to only visit an Amish farm to recognize that where technology does indeed save time (an hour’s commute by a car can be twice that in a horse and buggy), shedding one’s self of the daily convenience of modernity is no simple matter.

Do we even know what it means to go back to a “simple life”?  Or, by that concept and idea, do we merely mean the peeling away of complexities that have formed in our subjective states of mind, like barnacles that accumulate on the underside of boats over years and timeless travel through life’s trials and tumults, only to have a period of need where chipping them off becomes a necessity?

Television shows and various movies provide for nostalgic images that stir an emotional sense within all of us – of those days of lazy summer when childhoods were enveloped within a haze of timeless carefree thoughts, like so many waves rolling upon the warmth of sand dunes and castles created that only crumble once the day is over.  But that is the point, is it not – of a fictional state of things, of a world that is looked upon with fondness but probably never was, except in the imaginary memories of writers who realize the need to have a hope for a simpler life, but recognize that the reality is much more complex that they would have us believe.

Notice the subtle differentiation – between the “simple life” and the “simpler life”?  That is all we can ultimately hope for – not the former, but perhaps the latter.

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 the Federal or Postal job, preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application will often constitute the requirement of striving towards the objective of a simpler life.

The medical condition itself may be complex; the interaction with one’s agency or the postal facility within the context of that medical condition and “dealing” with them about needing to attend to one’s medical condition – all of that is complex and complicated.  And, while a Federal Disability Retirement application does not guarantee a “simple” life, what it does do is to provide an avenue to simplify the greater complexities of life’s trials by preparing for an uncertain future that only seems to be getting more and more complicated.

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

 

FERS/CSRS Disability Retirement: Of tripe, tropes and trickling trivialities

One rarely thinks in terms of multiple stomachs, but certainly cows have them; but when we consider the tripe of language, we project only the inherent foolishness of man.  Of tropes, we may envision a higher calling; though, of course, figurative speech requires greater imagination and creativity, and the dullness of many falls back naturally into either the first or second stomachs of the bovine kind, and not merely to be digested and emitted through the natural canals of intestinal tracts, but by metaphorical heights of human depravity.  Then, of course, there are trivialities, and most of the drip-drip-drip sort, and never in voluminous waves of profundities, but merely superficial utterances of inane particles.

Much of everyday phenomena falls into one of the three categories; and of the first, it allows for wiggle-room into a fourth because of the dual definitions presented.  Indeed, there is great similarity between tripe and truth.  In actuality, farmers will tell us that the cow has only one stomach, but with four distinctive compartments, identified as the Rumen, the Reticulum, the Omasum and the Abomasum.  It is the last of the four which actually digests the food, but the first three allow for the complex mixing of saliva and digestive enzymes, the processing and breaking down of the products of the earth taken in – sort of like an organic factory.

That is the awe of it all, isn’t it –and the irony; for, we see the bovine creature, stoic with its forlorn eyes, standing in its own manure in order to be treated as an assembly-line receptacle in order to produce products to be shipped across the country, and contained within its multiple compartments comprises a reflection of the type of efficiencies which we attempt to mirror and copy.  And then, on top of it all, we slaughter and tear out the first two or three in order to create delicacies for those who prefer the delectable entrees of chefs known to make masterpieces out of common fodder.  Of tropes, of course, we categorize as thoughtful reproaches less evident because of their figurative requirements; but of trickling trivialities, we have to endure because much of society has become entrapped by the inane details of personal lives and stardom’s prurient interests.

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 beckoning call must come neither from tripe, nor tropes, nor even from trickling trivialities.

For, in the end, the need to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits comes about precisely because the seriousness of the medical condition compels one to view other problems as mere trickling of trivialities; that the suffering, pain and anxiety created by the medical condition is no longer a figurative existence like the tropes of literature; and with great certainty, we come to recognize that the digestive processes of a tripe cannot cure the reflective need to change the produce of a world uncaring, even if it is sifted through the complex compartments of a bovine creature, leaving aside the inane foolishness of the world’s loss of character in a life still valued for future engagement.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement: Simplifying the Complexity of a Case

Have you ever had a technical person explain things in the mysterious jargon of his or her specialized field?  Or, the one who breaks it down into coherent components and translates it into a language game which is comprehensible?

Those in the former category are usually quite impressed with themselves, and are happy to hear the sound of their own voices as the supposed explanatory interlude maintains a semblance of technical competence superior to the audience of targeted turmoil.

The latter populace does what few have come to recognize:  competence is not determined by mere superiority of technical knowledge, but the ability and capacity to apply the knowledge, reduce it to its simplified contents, then provide an explanatory foundation through reduction of complexities into manageable form.  Otherwise, the esoteric nature of any discipline will be governed by every schmoe who can master the language game, without actually acquiring the technical expertise in the application of select knowledge.  For, in the end, the test of sincerity of words is not a compounding of further words, but of actions following up with a revealed understanding of both what was said, as well as done, in any given context.

Similarly, the fact that the salesman can talk the lingo of technology does not mean that he or she can fix a broken computer; it just means that the salesmanship is a learned volume of nice-sounding paragraphs.  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, the entrance into the universe of Federal Disability Retirement may be an option which must be entertained.  It is a surreal world of new terms, technical contents and definitional strangeness which constitutes a complexity beyond mere words, simply because the consequence of decisions made today will impact choices governed by tomorrow.

Can the complexity of the Federal Disability Retirement process be simplified such that comprehension of the bureaucratic procedures can be understood for its administrative context in the importance of both process and substance of content?  Because Federal Disability Retirement involves statutes, regulations and court case-laws of precedence from previous cases challenging various aspects of the process and substantive issues, the complexity of the entire venue is based upon the cumulative aggregate of decades in the making.  But of that larger universe of process and procedures, what splinter and slice is actually relevant to one’s particular case?  Probably a very small portion.  That is the focus which should be taken.

When one enters an arena of mystery, it is difficult to determine the relevance within the context; and relevance requires selective content and re-creating of one’s own context.  For Federal and Postal employees who need 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, the importance of simplifying the complexity of one’s own case should be governed by information, knowledge, and selective application of relevance and required completion of necessary content.

Try this for a change, as a test of the principle of knowledge and application:  enter one of those chain-gadget stores and hand the know-it-all salesman a gadget needing repair, and see the language game of competence turn to a stuttering paragraph of excuses and explanations about how the complexity of the component is simplified by the simple justification:  Not my Department.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement: The Long Goodbye

The relegation to the basement office; the loss of niceties with coworkers; the negation of superlatives from higher ups; the clues become overt, blatant and uninviting.  Long goodbyes are often fertile ground for the souring of relationships forged over decades, and human interactions which reveal a perversity once thought uncommon.  Does the past count for anything, anymore?

Medical conditions and their impact are meant to evoke empathetic responses; instead, they often bring out the worst in humanity.  For Federal agencies and the U.S. Postal Service, they portend of headaches and interruption of efficiency; they are a bother.  For the Federal employee and the U.S. Postal worker who suffers 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 positional duties, the growing absences, the need to attend to one’s medical conditions — all become the priority of life and living.

From the agency’s viewpoint, it is a malignancy of logistical magnitude; another problem to be solved; and the longer the goodbye, the greater the extenuating interruption.  It is this clash of interests which calls for resolution.

Filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether one is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is an indicator to the agency that there is an end in sight, and once filed, it is merely a waiting game before finality of decisions is reached.  Often, the mere filing relieves the increasing pressure felt, like the encasement of boiling water which needs an outlet.

Medical conditions often require a long journey of sorts; it is the long goodbye which makes it all the more evident.

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