QUOTE OF THE DAY

Many people draw disability of one type or another, either military “service-connected,” which means the taxpayer is on the hook for the rest of their lives or some other long-term disability scam that always leads into Social Security, by the way.

When I got laid off from being a program management team member doing important financial analysis for the General’s Staff at Tinker (haha! I tracked the red numbers and why they were so large! Turns out there were hordes of union members out behind the building smoking while logged into job codes requiring one person for ten minutes. I turned in a report showing 26 union guys all signed in to put ropes around a work site for a half day. And I got a nasty letter from the union rep telling me I could not use any union member’s names when I was reporting on inefficiency.

Only management.

So, management got rid of me.

Since I KNEW I was being laid off in advance, I signed up for the long-term insurance plan (which I would not ever have done except I was being a bit snarky about the complete and total disregard for the “monopoly money” the AF was spending on people doing absolutely nothing all day (including myself at times!) and I scheduled myself for surgery I’d been putting off.

My evil plan was to develop complications which would give me 80% of my salary for two years while I got my double vision/tilted image corrected from all the damn brain surgeries I’d had the previous few years. I literally had brain surgery and came back to work within a week the first time, with a scarf and a pair of dark glasses. I had to wear an eye patch to walk straight. A co-worker usually walked with me when I had to actually make an appearance. (You wouldn’t want a high-ranking Civil Servant knowing the financial analyst on the team was blind without corrective prism lenses, would you?)

So, I had it all planned out! I would get my eye surgery and then, would develop complications to see if I could extend the disability status for the full two years! That would have put me almost at my son’s high school graduation date, which was when I planned to stop working and move here to the boonies anyway.

Well, since correcting my visual impairment took three surgeries (snipping things around the eye is delicate work, Dr. Farris told me, so tiny incremental corrections are safer, though it takes longer to correct the problem.) Since I had TWO YEARS to draw 80% of my salary, I thought, I told him that was not a problem at all.

So, I had the third surgery a couple months into being laid off, all on the company’s dime (they paid COBRA premiums for three months… what a company!) and then was about to transition from the short-term insurance plan into the long-term plan when I got notified that the long-term plan was actually a scam to get me onto Social Security disability forever, sort of.

I can’t remember how it worked exactly, but basically, the company would pay the “difference” between what SSI would pay and what my 80% of salary would be. Which meant I had to apply for disability from Social Security and the doctor would have to fill out a bunch of paperwork other than just signing my prepared letter. (I learned years and years ago that if you write yourself a professional letter explaining why you need what you want, a doctor will usually sign it. Why not? They have zero accountability. However, if the doctor has to actually fill out a form? Forget it.)

Even though I was perfectly happy to screw over the company out of Alexandria (a big conference room overlooking the Potomac filled with idiots and assholes when I was there), I was NOT willing to go on the government dole for my evil scheme. I got “better” at the point where it would have gone to SSI and got another job for another contractor doing worthless labor for the government. I took a technical writing job that turned out to be the stupidest writing job ever. But, that is a story about selling worthless equipment and parts to third-world countries that barely had a military, didn’t need the airplanes and parts and couldn’t read or understand the redacted, retyped and reprinted technical orders we provided. Imagine just deleting the paragraphs which are considered “sensitive” and replacing them with…. NOTHING.

We literally ended up with procedures for repair that looked almost like this.

Step 1. Open Panel.
Steps 2 through 9 redacted for security reasons.
Step 10. Close Panel.

It was torture having to be a technical writer for a bunch of immoral bastards selling the Indonesian army broken helicopters and indecipherable technical manuals. Maybe I should have told the big whopper and gotten on the government dole then.

However, I am willing to place a bet that many people, given that same opportunity, would have gone the long-term route. Because after the two years, the insurance supplement to bring the monthly “check” (UBI?) to 80% (TAX FREE) stopped, but the Social Security money would keep on coming unless I sent in a notice saying I was no longer disabled.

No kidding. I could have been drawing that huge SSDI check all this time and all I had to do was “say” I continued to have pain, discomfort… whatever it was that would allow me to be on the government dole.

Either way, when I got “laid off” I never went onto “unemployed” stats. I was disabled until I went back to work writing tech data for people who couldn’t read it. What a country.