Medical Retirement under FERS & CSRS: The Art of Expression

The title itself plays upon multiple meanings and combinations of words otherwise with connotations and implications intended within a panorama of conceptual constructs utilized in everyday discourse.

‘Art’ itself is an expression of sorts; “Expression’ is both a form of ‘Art’ and an actualization of it; and so to refer to the ‘Art of Expression’ is not merely somewhat of a redundancy, but further, a tricky combination of two entirely separable concepts, independent and yet expressing [sic] a specific duality of meanings.  Expression, whether of the verbal sort or, as in this instance, of the written variety, is indeed a form of art.  It is so by default.  Not being a discipline of precision; not anywhere near a science of any sort; not an academic major or even a subject that can ever be fully mastered; it is, nevertheless, an art form that thrives or places an indelible blemish upon the language of one’s upbringing.

Good writing, concise discourse, proper grammatical usage and persuasive argumentation in delineating a perspective and point of view continues and remains an art form that is lost in the daily plethora of linguistic garbage.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition requires the Federal or Postal employee, whether under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, to ponder preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, consideration must ultimately be given to the art of expression when formulating the answers to SF 3112A, Applicant’s Statement of Disability.

In preparing, formulating and putting the final edits and touches upon one’s Statement of Disability, the Art of Expression must be considered:  Does it adequately describe your medical conditions and the symptoms experienced?  Do the legal arguments persuade?  Does the medical documentation support the statements put forth?  Does the statement paint a picture of coherence within a universe of incoherence engendered by the medical condition itself?  Is the nexus sufficiently created between the medical condition and the positional duties?  Has one applied the principles of Henderson v. OPM, the Bruner Presumption, the Simpkins application, the Bracey Principles and multiple other legal underpinnings?

The Art of Expression is the capacity to pull together the vast compendium of expressive resources available, and the first step in reaching that goal is to consult with an attorney who specializes in preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement Representation: Last stands

Of course, the one that always pops up in one’s mind is the most ignoble of them all, with the image from the movies depicted over and over: Of a blond-haired, straggly and wild-eyed man with a mustache of extravagant vintage taking a desperate last stand against the charging Indians.  Custer’s last stand somehow reverberates throughout the mythology of the American West, even though folly is mistakenly replaced by some view of courage or other laudable character traits.

It is the last stand of American Lore; but there are many others besides, some known, most in the private worlds that never become public.  We all have them; the proverbial line in the sand, the wall against which our backs are blocked, or perhaps the final straw that breaks the camel’s back.

When Federal Agencies propose a removal of a Federal employee, it is the “last stand” both for the Federal agency as well as for the Federal employee.  Or, is it the “last straw”?  Is there a difference between the two?  The latter, of course, constitutes the final act by one or the other individual or entity, and represents a reflection of having no other alternative, no room for compromise and left with no other choice.  But that also describes the former, to the extent that it reflects a situation that allows for no further room but to remain resolved in whatever hill of pride or fortitude one must consecrate the grounds with.

Last stands, however, need not result in the consequences that Custer’s famous one represents.  It need not be the final arbiter of a life well lived, and still to be lived.  Yet, Federal and Postal employees 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 job, often look upon his or her medical condition as a “last stand” of sorts – one that ends one’s career and, in some mindsets, the very life that one is gifted with.

But keeping a balanced and proper perspective is important in all matters (though, for Custer as he realized that he had been boxed into a valley where there was no escape, perhaps there was no such thing as a “balanced perspective”), and the Federal or Postal employee finding him or herself in the “last stand” position of no longer being able to perform all of the essential elements of one’s job, is still left with some alternatives – one being, filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

It is an option that should be seriously considered, for having the benefit of a Federal Disability Retirement allows for a second career in the private sector or public state or local government, and allows the Federal or Postal employee to continue in another vocation or career, thus avoiding the disastrous consequences that have been historically annotated by Custer’s last stand.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Disability Retirement from Working with the Federal Government: Originality

It is a frightening word; for, it is what we all strive for, yet almost always fall short, fail or attempt to justify and obfuscate for not quite reaching that goal.

Fortunately, there are at least two, but likely an infinite number of, avenues of avoidance in being charged with its lack:  First, and fortunately, plagiarism is not a criminal offense and, moreover, no one really seems to care except in the most egregious of instances, and furthermore, for those professing to be constrained by Catholic orthodoxy, it isn’t even a venial sin, let alone a mortal one.

Second (and ad infinitum as to the corollaries, so that we do not have to go beyond the phrase, “And secondly” or engage in the Internet’s most popular search engine contrivances that always includes, “Five ways to..” or the “Ten most important…”), there is always an excuse for its lack, beginning with:  “Well, I did the best I could”; “It’s not so important to be unique as to feel good about yourself”, and the dead ringer:  “There is no originality left; everything has already been spoken for.”

Is that why the period between “the original” and “the remake” keeps becoming shorter and shorter?  Is it an unavoidable truism that – from themes and plots for stories, novels and other similar genres, to television shows and movies, as well as songs and artworks – there is a limit of finite constraints that even human creativity cannot avoid?

History reveals that originality of profound dimensions will arise in spurts and burps; from Continental Europe’s juggernaut of painters and writers, to America’s continuum of astounding literary greats including Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Updike to Vonnegut; and, in the great tradition and power of the Russian novelists and playwrights, from Dostoevsky to Chekhov and multiple others, without even reaching back to centuries preceding, the originality of works steeped in profound insights cannot be denied.

Has modernity followed a similar course, or has the bludgeoning of unceasing informational overload tempered the capacity of human creativity?

There is a known, coy quip about the formulaic recipe for great literary or visual works:  “Have a terrible childhood, and write about it.”  Thus, such a perspective is reinforced by Dickens and other coconspirators.  A cousin to that rule is to live through political turmoil under repressive circumstances, and the validation for that is revealed by Eastern European and South American writers of current vintage, especially now that translations have been improved and perfected.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are considering filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, to be filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, the concern about originality should enter but only in a cursory manner.

Facts must guide; the evidence will prevail.

In preparing answers to the connivances of questions required on SF 3112A (Applicant’s Statement of Disability), do not try to be “original” in writing the narrative of one’s life, medical conditions and the impact upon one’s positional duties.

Remember always the other quip that must be recognized:  That each individual is already a paradigm of the original, and while the narrative engaged may not always be unique, and the reviewer at OPM may have “seen one and seen them all”, it is nevertheless one of a kind whether recognized and acknowledged by others, precisely because the life-experiences the Federal Disability Retirement applicant has endured has been nothing but original in the first instance.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: The din of silence

They are opposites, and yet they can confer meaning and communicate conceptual clarity by the very usage of simultaneous reflection in conjoined placement within a singular sentence of repose.  Can silence be of such tumultuous unnerving, and a confusion of loud noises be characterized within the context of its opposite, and still retain a clear sense of meaning?  Would it make the similar, mirror-image sense if we transposed and flipped those same words, and instead spoke about the “silence of din”?

That makes it sound like a movie title, or a short story encompassing a mysterious foreign land where Zen monks chant within the quiet gaze of an assassin’s eye.  But there are times when silence becomes so overwhelming in its quietude, that truths become revealed and concealed perspectives are suddenly manifested, and it is during those moments of enlightening revelations that realizations of necessity come to the fore (or, perhaps, it merely means that our stomachs are rumbling and we are merely hungry).

To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, the ever-mischievous agnostic, who once quipped that when a person thinks that questions of eternal salvation, the need for a higher being and questions of profundity encapsulating transcendent issues and metaphysical concerns begin to invade and come to the fore, it is probably nothing more than indigestion and a good pharmacological prescription pill should take care of it.  But it really does not work the other way, or make any sense, does it?

There is no “silence of din” – the latter is just that, a tumultuous cacophony of deafening onslaught, and that describes most of living in modernity, where the search for a slice of silence within that din is like a breath of eternal sighs in exasperated tones of forgiving acrimony.

But there is a “din of silence” – that moment when we can stand in the unprovoked thoughts of our own reflections, when we can remove ourselves for a slice of contractions where pain cannot reach and confusion will not confound, and it is in the monastic paradigm of clashes where worth and value coalesce, when thought and action extend, and how the true essence of a person becomes revealed in a moment of naked reality.  But then, the real world comes crashing back, and we awaken from the slumber of transcendence.

There is, often in the momentary timelessness between reality and slumber, a realization of that which needs to be accomplished in order to move forward.  That is the point when the Federal or Postal employee, who experiences the pain of a medical condition, must decide as to whether to continue in the same modality as the “rest of the world” in trying to just survive, or to “move on” to another stage of life.

It sometimes takes the din of silence to figure that out; but for the Federal or Postal employee 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 the Federal or Postal position, it is never advisable to wait for the din of silence before deciding to file 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; for, in the end, you may end up in the silence of din before achieving the peaceful repose of the din of silence.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Employee Medical Retirement System under FERS or CSRS: The footnote

Who reads them, anymore?  Defined as an ancillary or corollary piece of information beyond that which is stated in the body of the main text, the footnote represents that which reflects an addendum and not something that is considered “required reading”, but more likely for the benefit of those who enjoy quixotic minutiae and esoteric details of irrelevant import.*  As referenced in history, one who is relegated to the afterthought failed to reach the first order of things, and their lack of relevance is reflected by banishment to the bottom of the page.

Before computers were invented, long before the notion of “cut and paste” defined the laziness of intellectual prowess, the writer had to engage in prescient forethought, and calculate by measured deliberation the space to leave, the length of the footnote, and whether there was enough white-out left in the crusted bottle to make up for any lack of proper preparation.

The pretentiousness of the pseudo-intellectual, of course, was to have footnotes of greater length than the body of the text itself, spanning multiple pages so that the reader would become confused as to what constituted relevance in contrast to signification of purpose, where some pages barely had a sentence with but a horizontal mark demarcating the onerous esoterica of erudite irrelevancy.  And the worst, of course, is when a teacher or professor would ask a test question based upon one; for, again, the common refrain was twofold:  Who reads them?  Were we required to read them?  And the scoffing retort from the test-giver — that god amongst gods who held grades, fate and future plans in the palm of a single hand: If it was in the assigned material, it was “required reading”.

Much later, of course, we came to realize that “it was really good for us to read them” (though we never really believed such inane confessions), or to our own children, “When I was your age, and computers weren’t yet invented…” (with but a reactive facial expression beyond capacity to translate).  In the end (literally and figuratively), we all realize that the footnote itself represents mere distractions upon an otherwise ordered pagination of an author’s meanderings, and for ourselves, that they reflect a metaphor of who we are.

Most of us are treated as mere footnotes, left unnoticed, disregarded except for occasional reference by accident or happenstance.  For the Federal employee or U.S. Postal worker who has come to a point in his or her career, where a medical condition has progressed to a deteriorating consensus of requiring an alternative plan of action, being treated as a footnote within a subtext of irrelevancy amongst a sea of bureaucratic inefficiency, is likely a feeling of growing concern.

As footnotes are deliberately disregarded, so the majority of people are like those masses of addendum relegated to unnoticed details of sub-citizenship.

Filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management will often elevate one’s status and stature for a time, if only because the Agency or U.S. Postal Service is suddenly forced to read the footnote, and take notice of the subtext; but beyond that, it is the medical condition itself which relegates the Federal or Postal employee to that numbering at the bottom of the page and left to irrelevancy, precisely because you are not one of the “productive” ones.

How does one force the “outside world” to “read” you?

In the end, there is life beyond a career with the Federal Agency or the U.S. Postal Service, and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is merely a first step in getting beyond being relegated to a mere footnote.

As with those generals who served alongside Eisenhower, Grant, Lee and forgotten Roman centurions, most of us are mere footnotes, and glad of it for the unnoticed joys we can embrace in the anonymity of our privacy, and for the Federal or Postal worker who wants to get beyond the notoriety accompanying that unwanted attention for merely having a medical condition — and thus temporarily assigned to the body of the “main text” for being a nuisance — preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application with OPM is often the first step towards asserting one’s rights to getting back to the footnote of time and timelessness, where most of us want to remain, in the cocoon of irrelevancy and historical afterthoughts.

 

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*Footnote 1:  Just to make sure; otherwise, refer to page 3,275 herein, where you will be required to obtain a special password and key in order to access a pseudo-intellectual forum of erudition within an ivory tower of confounding thoughts, for further reference to important commentaries otherwise pretentiously inserted in order to appear intelligently cogent.

 

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Medical Retirement: When we used to speak of meaningful things

Perhaps the negation of ideas trickles down, just as water from a crack in the roof tiles; of Derrida, Foucault and the deconstruction movement after the lengthy period of disillusionment represented by the French Existentialists headed by Camus and Sartre; for, if meaning constitutes parity and the loss of hierarchies and paradigms in crumbling corners of inconvenient truths, then Orwell’s prediction of how totalitarianism will infect society with the tools of our own making, will come about sooner than we thought possible.

Let us not speak of Logical Positivism and how the expungement of ethics and metaphysics from kitchen table discussions resulted in the loss of meaning, value and truth; for, if validity of a statement is determined from on high in the ivory towers of Russell, Wittgenstein and Ayers, et al., one has only to look at the state of British society today to realize that while the island continent allowed for profundity of thought in the isolation of its heyday, its impact and influence should have remained contained in order to spare the rest of mankind.

There was a time when we used to talk about meaningful days.  Oh, it doesn’t refer necessarily to what is said, but more as to the discretion of what is kept silent.  For, it is the pause between thought and spoken word which reflects the depth of thoughtfulness; and, in modernity, the comma of silence between the typed garble considered a sentence, and the push of that button which shoots it into the eternal space of the Internet.  Just take a cursory preview of random Facebook and Twitter pages; of the inane, the insane and the intemperate; there was once, long ago, a time when work and toil to put bread on the table prevented the leisure of thoughtlessness allowance for indiscretion of a spoken word.

To be wrong is one thing; most mistakes are correctible and even forgivable; it is the engagement of lack of thought, discretion and unadulterated vacuity of breathtaking stream of words spoken, shared and disseminated without care, which destroys the society of binding values and becomes replaced with angry shouts of rights and privileges, and more so by those who engage in the self-immolation of devaluating acts.

Greater quantification of information does not implicate knowledge, leaving aside the concept of wisdom; instead, as Orwell knew so well, words mean something.  We tend to think that the more said, the greater volume of voice, and the increased amassing of a library of information, somehow leads to a smarter society.  It is, instead, quite the opposite, and the negative effect of thrashing about to escape from quicksand; the more we say, the stupider we appear.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are contemplating preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, it is important to understand that obtaining a cogent and effective medical narrative, in conjunction with preparing a compelling Statement of Disability on SF 3112A, are the two mainstays of a high-octane Federal Disability Retirement packet which increases the chances of a successful outcome.

Federal and Postal employees who are seeking to file for Federal OPM Disability Retirement benefits need not worry about speaking or discussing meaningful things; the tragedy of a medical condition, by its very nature, is a significant event which impacts upon a life, a career and a future.  Yes, there was a time when we used to speak of meaningful things, but those days are over — but for the intersection of human lives when words really matter, and lives are actually lived.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire