Federal Disability Retirement Benefits: Escaping reality

In some sense, everyone does it; in another, no one can.  For, in a general, generic meaning of the term, to “escape reality” is to merely engage in an activity that allows one to take a break from the ordinary and mundane, as in going to a movie, watching television, playing a video game or engaging a game of chess. In the same vein of meaning, however, one could argue that such leisurely pastimes constitute a reality no less real than working, dealing with life in other ways and attending to one’s daily duties and obligations – it is simply in a different “form”. […] Read More …

FERS Disability Retirement Pensions: In between preparations for vanishing

The Biblical reference is where John the Baptist declared that his role in the historical narrative would naturally diminish by relevance in order for the primary character to loom large upon a world in need of the coming Savior. […] Read More …

Postal & Federal Employee Disability Retirement: The frog and the twig

Upon first encounter, the two appear not to have any correspondence or connection, leaving aside any explanatory significance to the issues of Federal Disability Retirement benefits for Federal employees or U.S. Postal workers. Yet, it is always of interest to show how the “relatedness” of seemingly disparate concerns intermingle and intersect with each other. The fact is, whether in a direct and non-subtle manner, or in some transcendent metaphorical context, Federal and Postal employees, whether under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset who find themselves at a point in their careers where filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits becomes a necessity, […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: A break from the quotidian

Is there ever a release from the commonplace? We take it so for granted – those mundane occurrences of daily living – until the greater pain of life’s misgivings overwhelm and supersede. The quotidian is a fancy term for the everyday; that routine which we engage in from the moment our eyes open, the sleepiness is cast aside, and the feet are sheathed into slippers or socks, or perhaps not at all; and all that was just described, as well, constitutes the quotidian. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Sedimentary Structures

In interpreting geological formations by natural deposits involving complex strata of ahistorical significance, we are better able to conceptualize the environment, the impact of changes by weather, temperature vicissitudes, and organic alterations whether man-made or neutral in their deliberations. River flows and their swirls of changing directions; droughts, sudden floods, or the soft and natural flow of a forming inlet; these all impact and influence the sedimentary structures which form over time, unnoticed to an ahistorical perspective. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The complexity of human experience

We take for granted much, and dismiss with careless appreciation the residue of crumbs begotten. The idiom that refers to the final straw which breaks a camel’s back — why does the foreign species have an impact upon a culture which is unfamiliar with such a beast of burden? Is it that, despite the images produced against the background of pyramids and pharaohs of a bygone civilization, the essence and theme of the proverbial statement resonates, whether replaced by a horse, a donkey or an ox? […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: The lethargic state of tacit acceptance

Life has a way of beating down. Whether it is from the constant drudgery of daily responsibilities, or perhaps the overwhelming bombardment of the harsh technological stimuli foreign yet to the still evolutionary sensibilities of nature’s slow progression for adaptability; the human body, mind and soul, while possessing a capacity for resistance greater than many other species, nevertheless is contained by limits of restrictive mechanisms tested daily beyond the tolerance of allowable endurance. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Medical Retirement: When the superior argument no longer prevails

The potentiality of applying “jury nullification” opened the door to defiance, in a society constructed upon recognition, application and enforcement of “the law”; but of course, one may argue that such wholesale rejection of a conceptual construct deemed immoral or otherwise unfairly prejudicial, is itself a moral judgment which is allowable. Would anyone argue that a jury which refused to convict during a trial in a repressive and totalitarian regime — say, in North Korea today, or during the Stalinist era — constituted “jury nullification”? Or, would one simply declare that “the people” rightly and collectively decided to “stand up” against injustice, and applied a higher standard of the law — one which transcends the state’s attempt to impose […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Life’s Alterations

Spring comes and we clean out old hoardings, discard past articles once thought to be valuable and inseparable from our identity; or perhaps what pop culture has deemed a justifying course of decision-making because there is an inevitable “mid-life crisis“, or some other equally biologically-driven, primordial determinism which compels one to act in one way, as opposed to another. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Benefits: The Wind-Up Man

Before the age of batteries and electronic sophisticates, there were wind-up toys. Mere mechanical wonders involving hidden spring actions and tightly wound coils for deliberative unwinding to propel movement, they betrayed a sense of wonder for their independence once released by the child’s hand. But the movement stopped; the unwinding of spring actions released to their full extent; and further human involvement was necessary. In stage plays of yore, what amounts to a “deus ex machina” required intervention; and so the thumb and forefinger would grasp the flat key inserted in the back of the toy, […] Read More …