FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The title itself

Sometimes, it is good to go “back to the basics”.  Throughout these blogs for these past and many years, the attempt has been to relate common everyday experiences and life’s challenges to the Federal employee and U.S. Postal worker struggling daily to maintain one’s career and to extend a career in the face of a medical condition.  Yet, the primary focus has always been to try and remain informative; to give some sense of the process of filing […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: The regularity of life

Metaphors abound, of course; of the stream of life, its cadence, likened to a steady march and the cyclical nature wrapped in the repetition of the growing dawn followed by the setting sun.  The regularity of life represents a rhythm and monotony that provides a blanket of comfort (there goes the metaphor, again) that can be extracted from the lack of chaos.  Most of us thrive best within the regularity of life’s monotony; it is the very few who seek and relish the chaos of life. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: The Habit

No, this is not about that peculiar creature that Tolkien created who used to rule the earth but now hides in little dirt hutches in the deep recesses of forests (don’t all children and adults who have read his works believe in their heart of hearts that Hobbits still exist, and we just don’t see them?); rather, this, too, is a creature of sorts, just not the imaginary creation that gave joy to so many.  How is it that we come to learn it?  Is there a numerical value that must be first ascribed before the regularity of X becomes a Habit-Y?  […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement for Federal Employees: Poetry’s death

By the title is not meant the terminus of the literary genre; that would be too great a claim to consider. No; instead, it is the more subtle manner of thought, the perspective of viewing, and the approach to living. We live by metaphors and analogies; that is what the rise of language has accomplished, where the raw violence of predatory insights in nature’s setting of surviving could no longer tolerate, but where some amount of leisure, such little calculation of foresight, and a crumb of thoughtful reserve allowed for a world of mythological beauty. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement under FERS or CSRS: “The End”

Those two words are often appended upon the last word, the final thought, the grammatical period marking the denouement of a narrative; sometimes, an ellipsis leaving the reader to ponder a missing word, concept or continuation of an event. Why it is not stamped in bold print at the end of a biography or a non-fiction narrative; or even a short story, an essay or a philosophical treatise; perhaps, as a factual account presupposes a reflection of correspondence between truth and reality, it is only in the literary world of make-believe […] Read More …

FERS Medical Retirement: Meaning, Value and Worth

The last in the tripartite of this conceptual construct possesses a relational significance, where fluctuation of the assigned designation may occur based not upon extrinsic objectivity, but upon a personal sense of attachment, and thus the influence on a spectrum may artificially go up or down depending upon whims of fancy.  The middle term, on the other hand, […] Read More …

OPM Medical Retirement: The reservoir of vitriol

Do you ever wonder at the seemingly inexhaustible volume of time people spend on expending and expiating their reserve of malice, hatred and sheer meanness of being? Time and energy spent on gossiping about others; of planning conspiratorial devices to undermine fellow coworkers, or to initiate harassing administrative sanctions and bureaucratic snafus in order to make life tougher, more miserable and uncomfortable for someone else. […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: The Happy Meter

We have metrics for everything, now; devices simultaneously wearable as necklaces to gauge heart rates and exercising of limbs; of crystals which tell of emotive alterations throughout the day; and connective apparatus lest we lose a signal within the vast field of human interactions with the greater world in distant horizons. Then, why not a “happy meter”? How would it determine the accuracy within a spectrum of a day’s journey? Would it be based upon a pinnacle on a graph? […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: The Demarcation between Sanity and…

The dividing line itself may be a false option; for, there may well exist a spectrum of alternatives prior to falling off of the fathomless cliff into the netherworld of the opposite. Yet, human behavior often reveals to us the tenuous hold we have upon this thin reed we identify as the “civilized” world, where conformity to standards of behavior are relatively followed, and the social contract between citizens constrains open aggression towards one another; and from the individual’s viewpoint, the internal mechanism of orderliness remains fairly intact. […] Read More …