Federal Disability Retirement Law: The Comfort of Static

Comfort relies upon the known.  It is change which is most often uncomfortable.  The known chair or sofa where one reclines upon day after day; the familiarity of one’s home; the dog which greets with joy; the spouse who gives a hug; the workplace where one has spent one’s career — these are the static experiences of everyday life, and which brings comfort through stability and consistency.

Change — of moving; of changing careers; children leaving the home; the family dog no longer in good health; financial changes; old friends suddenly appearing in the obituary; these, and so much more, add to the stresses of one’s life, precisely because the comfort of static is suddenly lost.

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, the comfort of static is lost as a result of the medical condition, the need to continue working, the loss of one’s health and the potential loss of one’s career.

Contact an OPM Disability Lawyer who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law, and begin the process of transitioning to a “new” comfort of static — of being an annuitant upon an approval of a Federal Disability Retirement application from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under FERS.

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.

 

FERS OPM Medical Retirement: The Haphazard Approach

The dual root foundations in the word itself imply a dangerous and directionless lack of methodology; for the “hap” is derived from the Old Norse word, “happ”, meaning “good luck” or chance occurrence, while the term “hazard” connotes danger and potential disaster.  The combination of the two form a compound word of sorts: of an event or action which lacks planning, order or direction.

The haphazard approach is one where a person engages in an activity or initiates an act without a plan, lacking in a methodology of discourse, and does it “on the fly”.  Perhaps one can get away with such an implementation for certain inconsequential activities, projects and ventures; but this is a world where competition and “beating each other out” is inherent in almost all phases and aspects of living.

It might be okay to engage in a haphazard approach when “funning around” with your kids, or even in going out with friends.  Not everything needs a plan; but in life, having a plan —a formulated approach that develops through thoughtfulness and deliberation of intent — is helpful.

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, it is perhaps a “fact” that the medical condition itself is a “haphazard” event — one which hits you without any plan or expectation.  How we deal with the medical condition, however, should never be a haphazard event, and preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, should not be ventured in a haphazard manner.

Consult with a Federal Disability Lawyer who specializes in FERS Disability Retirement Law and don’t let the winds of chance determine your future; instead, develop a cogent, coherent plan for the future and prepare for a planned battle with OPM to assert and obtain your rightful benefits.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement under FERS: Seeking stability

It is the constant tension between Parmenides and Heraclitus — those Pre-Socratic philosophers who first looked for a metaphysical foundation in comprehending the complexity of the universe.  In general, the former is known for his view about the ”oneness” of the universe; the latter, famously attributed with the statement that “No man steps into the same river twice”.  Both address the issue of the encounter with “Being” as Being itself, and not for any particular being.

Do the perspectives and philosophical beliefs of such “ancients” matter to us today?  Of course, we have only mere fragments of the writings of both philosophers, and so any attribution of thought may be tenuous, at best.  Nevertheless, it is the ongoing and historical tension between the two lines of thought which has any relevance or applicability for the modern individual.  That tension has to do with the manner in which we live, the outlook of our perspectives and the human need for constancy in a universe that often seems to be in perpetual turmoil.

Whether on a “macro” scale — i.e., of world affairs, the domestic front or even local news — one needs only to turn on the television to recognize the multifarious troubles of daily life.  Or, on the “micro”, more personal side: perhaps the illness of a loved one; the loss of a job; interpersonal relationships deteriorating — or a medical condition that has become chronic, where a Federal or Postal employee is concerned.

We all seek stability — a view like Parmenides’ philosophy — where we seek to have a sense of calm and quietude.  But the fact is that reality seems to always favor Heraclitus — of life as a stream that changes minute-to-minute, and a medical condition represents just that: a state of constant flux where stability will not yield.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who need to find some stability in their lives, filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is often the next logical step out of the turmoil and crisis that is created at work.

Seek the advice and counsel of a lawyer who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law in order to know your full rights.  Seeking stability in a world of turmoil is a very human need which we all desire, and for the Federal or Postal employee who can no longer perform one or more of the essential elements of his or her Federal or Postal job, the pathway of Parmenides is preferable to the rivers of Heraclitus.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

FERS Medical Retirement: Absurdity with an explanation

According to Quine, the great mathematician and logician, that is the definition of a paradox.  It is an event or a concept that seems at first glance to be an impossibility, or a conundrum of some complexity, but can be explained to unfold the absurdity first displayed.  Thus — of the man who has walked the earth for decades but is technically only 9 years old, until one realizes that his birthday falls on the 29th of February, a date that appears only once every 4 years; this is a paradox, until the absurdity is explained and it suddenly makes sense.

Similarly, a medical condition is a paradox: It is an absurdity of sorts, especially when it hits a person in the prime of his or her life.  What possible explanation can be had?  Where is the “fairness” in it, and why do some people who eat all sorts of junk food for years on end never experience the calamity of a chronic and progressively deteriorating medical condition?  Where is the “equal employment opportunity” of a devastating medical condition?

Where is the sense of “fair play” displayed when a medical condition pounces upon a Federal or Postal employee and suddenly no amount of past accomplishments make up for the sudden loss of productivity and need to use the accumulated sick leave, and even invoke FMLA rights in order to attend to one’s health?

For 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 Federal or Postal position, the paradox comes in the form of when to consider filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.  For, filing a Federal Disability Retirement application through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is indeed an admission of a need for change; yet, paradoxically, change is precisely what your Federal Agency or the Postal Service does NOT want — they want you to continue as before the onset of your medical condition.

The absurdity resides in the lost sense of priorities: work, as opposed to one’s health; stresses that exacerbate, as opposed to relieving those elements that contribute to one’s deteriorating conditions.  The only explanation that makes sense is to prepare, formulate and file a Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to OPM in order to be able to focus upon one’s health.

That is the paradox, and the absurdity with an explanation for a Federal or Postal employee who needs to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire
Postal & Federal Employee Retirement Attorney

 

Medical Retirement from Federal Government Employment: Amoebic Devolutions

What if the telltale signs are there, but we cannot, or are unwilling to, recognize them?  Perhaps the forward progress has already stopped, and we are in the throes of having reversed course without knowing, and that the innate genetic material by which Darwinian advancement promised a glowing epicenter of continual advancement, has in fact turned around, and we are witnessing the march towards a regressive, amoebic devolution?

Maybe we have already reached that penultimate pinnacle of a paradigmatic precipice, and the discovery of our technological prowess has already peaked, to where humanity’s U-turn is characterized by the behaviors we exhibit towards each other, to institutions we once beheld, and of reflections in misty ponds where our own images can no longer be discerned with clarity of teleological purpose, but where childhood dreams were once of fluttering butterflies, colorful not just in flights of fancy but in the twilight moon of castaway days, when goblins, elvin creatures and hobbits of yore delighted the human soul with imaginations beyond mere cravings of fantasies, but of that time when the breath of peaceful solitude cast shadows beyond the cavernous dangers where ogres lie?

Certainly, one can make a forceful argument that, If X constitutes the highest achievement of Man, then Y must be an indicator that the deconstructionism of civilization has already begun the process of devolving further into the abyss of decadence of soul.  Is this all there is in life?

Once, in days of Roman legions and civilizations expanding with the quickened pace of cultural upheavals, the dawn of man’s hope and the pinnacle of invention, the arts and the Renaissance of Timeless beauty brushed across the canvas of humankind, and revealed the inner sanctity of an empty religiosity.  There are no more principles worth dying for; and that is precisely why people blow themselves up.  There are no causes valued; and that is why despair pervades throughout.  Are those two candidates the best we can offer?

Do we treat our spouses as we would our best friend, before we discard the years of shared belongings like so many dishrags we fling down the garbage chute?

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, in addition to the harassment, difficulties and intimidations felt at work, it is often an agonizing decision to make — to take that initial step in order to begin the process of preparing, formulating and 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.

For, the tripartite compartmentalization of one’s life must coalesce in order to advance:  Recognition that the “status quo” cannot continue; a medical condition which prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of the Federal or Postal positional duties; the ability and capacity to amass and prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that all of the eligibility criteria for OPM Disability Retirement benefits are met.

And of the amoebic devolution?

That march in the midst of time cannot be stopped, any more than the harassment, intimidation and workplace hostility can be set aside; and as the latter is probably an indication of the former, it is best to accept the reverberating laughter of the gods who look coyishly down upon the caverns of that hell we create, and wink at them from afar with the knowledge that we may well join them in the greatest farce we have staged — that of Man’s capacity to live in his own excrement while delusionally opining on how cultivated he believes himself to be.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

FERS CSRS Disability Retirement from OPM: Fatal Flaws

Nature is harsher than the artifices created by man; egalitarianism or empathy for the less fortunate, are not found as traces of widespread encapsulation of the essence of the wild; instead, the opposite is true:  of indifference, abandonment in the face of a wounded comrade, and flight as opposed to commonality of surrender.  It is only in the antiseptic universe of human civilization that we discover character, trust and fortitude in the face of threat.

Is this a fatal flaw in the humanity of the species?  Perhaps.  Time will tell, as civilizations rise and fall, as to whether the inherent weakness of totalitarianism will succumb to the overt unsteadiness of democratic institutions, and whether kindness wins out over betrayal, truth over falsity, and cruelty above warmth of favor.  Malignancy is considered nature’s retribution against the unsettling forces of dominance and survival; but as history shows, the linear nature of our thought processes rarely reflects the reality of how man proceeds.  There are fatal flaws in every aspect of life’s misgivings; but most are merely defects correctible by substitution of lack with that of an addendum to afterthought.

In a Federal Disability Retirement application, there will be times when the U.S. Office of Personnel Management requests additional information because of an obvious lack; while a response does not necessarily guarantee an approval of one’s Federal Disability Retirement application, attending to the request will often appease the desire for more evidence.  If a Federal Disability Retirement application submitted to OPM has been denied at the Initial Stage of the process, are any errors or mistakes ever fatal flaws?  Rarely.  It depends.  Likely not.

Qualification: Undoing something is often more difficult than its opposite cousin in the affirmative; blinders cannot be placed upon OPM once they have reviewed something, and we cannot pretend that they haven’t already formed an “impression” of a case.  But corrections, supplemental information and addendum to deficiency; these are all the tools available for the Second Stage of the process — the Reconsideration Stage.

Then, of course, there is the avenue of the Third Stage, if such corrections have been unpersuasive or ineffective; and that would be an appeal to the U.S. Merits Systems Protection Board, where an Administrative Judge would decide the case.  There is even a “Fourth” Stage — a petition before the full board of the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.  Beyond that, an appeal to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals is also available, though the systemic losses in all of the previous forums identified, makes for a near-impossibility to reverse course at that level unless there are onerous legal grounds to argue.

As we pointed out at the begin of this parade of verbosity, natural law is lock-step in tune with the marching harshness (to remain true to the metaphor of parades, marching, bands, etc.) reflected by genetic deficiencies manifested as fatal flaws; but in the bureaucratic universe of administrative processes such as filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, the safeguards allowing for a multitude of due process steps rarely follows the trumpets and trombones (there again, that metaphor overplayed) of nature’s unforgiving ways.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Medically Retiring from Federal Government: Environmental Toxicity

We read about it in the print and other media; the global nature of the problem, the haunting images of rusting barrels and canisters with leaking liquids of foreign and unidentifiable hues of chemical mixtures; of stories involving deformed babies and cognitive delay, with early onset of dementia causally related to the drinking water, air pollution and osmosis of agents otherwise harmful.  Science Fiction writers employ the genre of antiseptic cities of artificial constructs, with men and women who venture out into the tainted world in white suits of sealed purity, breathing through tubes and oxygenated rasps barely audible through the thick materials of protective immunity.

China, we are told, basks in the careless disregard of deliberate destruction, with India lagging not too far behind, and then the “developing” countries; that the airstream, jet stream and water streams are all connected, like tentacles which relate back to the organic essence of human existence, and unless little old “me” and “I” and the pointed finger of accusatory mumblings does “his part” or “your part” in reducing all that mess that the proverbial “we” have created, that doom is just around the corner accompanied by “gloom” preceding its cousin; and so we laboriously cart our plastic bottles and milk cartons into larger and larger bins that have logos we proudly think represents the advancement and modernity of our thoughtfulness, and watch as the powerful jet set in private planes and get transported in SUVs that spew out untold tons of unseen pollutants in order to congregate and discuss the fate of the universe, the represented country, the state, the community and lil ol’ me.

Environmental toxicity, of course, is a real problem; it is the lip service paid by those who preach without actionable lives of verified sincerity which presents a problem for most.  And for the rest of us, the “little people” who matter not and impact insignificantly upon the global scale of policy interventions, there are multiple dimensions of the term itself — as in the quality of the workplace, the manner in which the employer treats employees, and in the Federal sector and the U.S. Postal Service, the application of relevance for the conceptual compound of the two words often implies more than the physical universe of occupied space; it involves the harassment, emotional abuse and hostility of purpose.

For the Federal employee and U.S. Postal worker who suffers from a medical condition, such that the medical condition compels the Federal or Postal employee 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 question of environmental toxicity is just that — not the wasteful plastics otherwise disregarded and discarded into the trash bin, but the real impact of a caustic atmosphere empowering little minds within fiefdoms of medieval power centers.

How the Federal agency treats “lil ol’ me”, and what the U.S. Postal Service does to its employees by requiring and forcing abusive repetition of physical labor, goes well beyond what the ordinary person cares about in China, India, et al.; instead, they want you to look beyond the window of your own house, even as the smoke fills and the fires blaze in the very neighborhood you live in.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire