Last Updated on November 25, 2011
“Black Friday” is a term which represents the concept of frenzied action, of waiting for the gates of hell to release the mass exodus of rationality, unleashed for the treadmill of buying, “saving” money by spending it, and furthering the cause of economic activity for the short term by exponentially expanding the debt-ceiling and widening the correlative concepts of debt, credit, and money-supply.
It is an apt metaphor for the way in which life is generally lived; and, further, it is an allegory for how Federal and Postal workers who are contemplating filing for Federal Disability Retirements benefits from the Office of Personnel Management, whether under FERS or CSRS, must conduct their day to day lives while working with a serious and impending medical condition. For, despite the clear and counterintuitive nature of continuing to work with a medical condition which feeds upon itself by progressively worsening and becoming more and more debilitating, exacerbated by the very work which is engaged in; and despite the obvious sense that Federal Disability Retirement benefits will provide the necessary relief in order for the Federal or Postal employee to reach a level of functionality such that the progressiveness of the medical decline will be stunted; nevertheless, it is the nature of man to work, and continue to work, at a job which is destructive to one’s health, because that is what the masses of activity-driven society (similar to the shoppers out and about on Black Friday) requires and mandates.
Federal Disability Retirement from the Office of Personnel Management is a benefit which is accorded to all Federal and Postal employees, as part of the entirety of one’s compensation package, which allows for an annuity based upon one’s average of the highest-3 consecutive years of service, a time of recuperation, and the potential to still participate in the economy of this country by being allowed to make up to 80% of what one’s former Federal or Postal salary presently pays. It is a thought which should be grasped, and paused for — just prior to those gates of frenzied action being opened.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire