if opm reasonable accommodation request is still not good enough for severe illness

Federal Disability Retirement: The tangents that bind

Posted onAugust 22, 2017AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

They are often viewed as mere distractions – those activities that fail to follow the centrality and linear path of core, essential projects. Or, more often than not, they are the wanderings and linguistic meanderings that make verbal communication all the more interesting – you know, that person that suddenly goes off on a tangent and tells an otherwise interesting story, but leaves you scratching your head with puzzlement and left dumbfounded. […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement Benefits: The mud of life

Posted onJune 13, 2017AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

The mud of life is the stuff of movies; we can romanticize it, serialize it into a best-selling paperback novel (skipping over the formality of a hardback in order to sell to the masses), and even turn it into a weekly television series; but in the end, what it means is that we are stuck in a rut at a gas station in the middle of a desolate desert with no money and no prospects. That is the metaphor of the phrase itself; there is little hope and even a fewer scintilla of a possibility of a potentiality to hope; many times removed, the mud of life is that period that we all hit now and again, where movement forward will never occur, and misery is the fated future forever and a day, […] Read More …

Disability Retirement for Federal Employees: Tomorrow’s project delayed

Posted onFebruary 27, 2017November 29, 2021AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

We tend to delay that which we know is best for us, and embrace the moment for which we pay a dear price. Man was created to engage projects; a purpose for life, a value for living, a reason to live. Why it is important to initiate, continue, accomplish and involve, are considerable in quantity: to make a living; to be compensated for work employed; to create and construct for the betterment of community and the greater world; and not merely because Heidegger posits that it is to avoid our mortality and the inevitability of our fate. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Civil Service: Preparing properly for each stage

Posted onFebruary 6, 2017AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

We often hear (and perhaps secretly scoff at?) the modern verbiage of a “Holistic” approach, where the missing consonant makes all the difference – as in the non-word, “Whole-istic”. It is the approach often ignored and replaced by its cousin – of looking at each stage of every unit in and of itself without taking into account the entirety of the process of an administrative procedure. For Federal Disability Retirement purposes, that is entirely and wholly a wrong approach. No unit or stage is an island, entire of itself; every stage of the process is a piece of the whole, […] Read More …

OPM Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: Character

Posted onJanuary 31, 2017AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

If a person points to another and states, “He is really a character”, is it different from positing: “He really has character”? Can both statements mean the same, or is the subtle difference there to denote? The former is customarily stated in defining a person as somewhat of an oddball, or perhaps eccentric to a degree that places him outside of the conventional norms of acceptable conduct. The latter, on the other hand, could also mean that – the possession of it modified by the adverb describes one with a plenitude of extraordinary traits. Or, it could connote the more classical meaning: A worthy person of honor, dignity, courage, moral foundation, etc. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement Law: The cruelty of our nature

Posted onJanuary 28, 2017February 8, 2022AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

Note that we are not positing that nature in general is cruel; for, in nature, predatory behaviors and devouring of one another is merely a tautological definition of nature itself, in the constant balance between prey and predator, betwixt overpopulation and dominance of one species over another, etc. No, the “our” refers to a specific species – of the human kind. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Natural empathy

Posted onJanuary 20, 2017AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

Is there such a thing, or do we just fake it even when we do not naturally “feel” it? If the official, technical definition fails to make the distinction between “feeling” and “understanding”, does it not discount the differentiation of the traditional bifurcation – that of rational capacity as opposed to part of one’s emotional quotient? Further, if it is merely an emotion, do some have a greater capacity because of a genetic predisposition, while others at a minimal level acquired through accident of birth, and thus can one be held responsible for merely being who we are? On the other hand, if it has a closer affinity to an “understanding” one possesses, […] Read More …