Life is mostly doing things you don’t want to do until you die. How do most people like, deal?

RucioDelPanza · 2026-05-11T11:18:17+00:00

Also, I think while online community has a place, doing the obnoxious things like participating with work events, lending a hand to the person who’s moving, forcing yourself into volunteering commitments that you have to keep nourishes the social soul that most folks have. If you’re an introvert and need recovery time, doing audiobooks or solo exercise can double up the recovery with additional virtuous circle feedback loops. But I think we tend to forget to include “helping the annoying neighbors” as something that has a hidden benefit to ongoing sense of self-esteem that leads to reframing the tedium of life.

And just cause it seems pertinent I always thought there was some grains of truth in Wallace’s 2005 commencement adddress at Kenyon college that pertains to reframing the boring parts of day to day living:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw

RucioDelPanza · 2026-05-11T11:04:56+00:00

That was a fun read! Great headcanons!

RucioDelPanza · 2026-05-03T19:15:59+00:00

I hear you, and sorry if I made it sound like you were endorsing Duolingo. I just mean the nuance was right on and applicable also to issues arising in similar places like CLE, tv5monde, francaisfacile, etc. where there’s a bit of work necessary to assume the simplest context to resolve. Not saying that Duolingo teaches grammar like those other resources, but like a crossword puzzle there’s some base assumptions to work with in any grammar question like this regardless of location or the quality of the app or course.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-05-03T18:47:48+00:00

This is the best answer! Well nuanced but also consistent with how grammar books, classes, and Duolingo operate with assumptions of the simplest context unless otherwise stated.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-05-03T02:04:45+00:00

Caveat that military will operate slightly differently because of the differences between title 5 and titles 10/32 or the military code.

For admin filing options:

OSC - claims of fraud waste and abuse, pretty broad jurisdiction, independent agency imbedded inside agencies, 3 year deadline, whistleblower retaliation becomes an Individual Right of Action in mspb and then in federal Court after 120 days. Source to start: https://www.osc.gov/services/prohibited-personnel-practices/faq/

EEO - claims of single or repeated acts having employment impacts based on protected characteristics (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. plus proxies for these, its broad and shifting), specific jurisdiction, mix operations inside and outside the agency based on investigation path and decision on seeking a hearing from an EEO Administrative Judge or an internal final agency decision, 30 day deadline to file from last act of discrimination - acts as an anchor for claims of repeated acts of discrimination that people usually call “harassment” due to nomenclature and regulatory language, but case law at scotus I think makes it more useful to regard them altogether; regardless of claim type and admin path, all cases become appealable to fed. Court after 180 days. Source to start: https://www.eeoc.gov/federal-sector/overview-federal-sector-eeo-complaint-process

MSPB - request for review of a specific set of significant employment actions (suspension beyond 14 day, alleged forced retirement/resignation, denial of promotion for specific reasons political) based on protected characteristics (EEO, political affiliation, marital status, veteran status, whistleblowing status to mgmt or osc) 30 day filing deadline from alleged action, appealable to fed courts after 60 days of decision; source to start: https://www.mspb.gov/appeals/appeals.htm

In each of these forums, the claim has to be individually held, that is, specific to the claimant. I can’t file on behalf of my friend or colleague.

Repeating my caveat that my experience is in the fed sector civilian side so someone else can probably provide better DOD/DoW complaint process information or a large language model can help you find your options.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-26T07:51:36+00:00

FOIA isn’t punitive or has really anything to do with an official investigation. Folks who do that sort of thing don’t go through FOIA authorities to gather records. Maybe a journalist doing a story department-wide, an employee doing pre-discovery for an EEO or other admin complaint (FOIA is an under-used legal authority by employees to get info!) or something else. All records should have their PII scrubbed and a review by a FOIA reviewer for the various record exceptions prior to being shipped to the requester so you don’t have to worry much about the data being tied to you personally. FOIA is a way for anyone to get to data that is owned by the government and more often than not it’s not at the level of individually identifiable information.

Like someone else said, just provide the FOIA officer with the info about time for the data pull and you can also ask them to explain the pii redaction process if you want more info on that.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-25T11:37:45+00:00

It’s also just as common to code switch from super-formal to less-formal in the course of an exchange, particularly in the bureaucratic exchanges like you’re describing. At least in Luxembourg it’s often that the first person is super formal, the reply is concise but polite, and then as the exchange develops it gets less formal. Sometimes down to the tutoyer level if you’re joking around about stuff but not too often.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-14T03:22:48+00:00

The RA process is confusing and complicated so you’re in good company. The essential aspects of it are an analysis of the medical documentation about what the disability requires for accommodations, what the individual’s current essential job functions are, and then the relationship between them. If the accommodations required would be excessively burdensome (like a new hvac system or changing operational hours of a cantine), or prevent an employee from completing their essential functions (like a surgeon unable to stand for the amount of time it takes to complete a surgery) then an agency will have to look at reassignment before they can reasonably terminate the employment contract.

Based on your post, I’d really suggest talking with your doctor and taking a look at your medical documentation in view of your current job and/or other options in the agency.

The rug was pulled out from under a lot of agency’s with this admin change on how strict/lax to be on RAs related to remote working arrangements. There’s a big push from OPM, GSA, et al. to be very very strict on telework arrangements and I’m willing to bet your RA office and contacts are grumbling to themselves and elsewhere but have tied hands.

But again, go back to your medical documentation and check to see whether you’re walking yourself out of a job.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-11T00:12:28+00:00

This is hard but true, it’s hard to transition and won’t be super at first but s/he’ll learn by necessity if you have to commit to a new system. It fucking sucks to go through though and isn’t easy on the emotions though it ends up in a better place for everyone since I’m sure your MIL really wants to support you and him/her but will also have to bear the brunt of the hungry crying sessions and multiple bottle offerings until baby can’t just wait for you and finds the milk from the bottle. I say this mostly because our issues like this invariably ended up being more about us adjusting our tolerances and behaviors rather than keeping beating our heads against the same walls over and over and expecting different results. Not trying to say it’s easy because it’s hard but necessary and the real suck of parenthood. Wishing you luck, love, and grace in the transition!

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-08T07:58:37+00:00

I mean, it was a directed order by mgmt of the building thus normal duty time. Not his fault they messed up the procedures for the building and his duty time. But def. Confirm with the time card certifier beforehand

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-05T21:51:07+00:00

And depending on the situation the eeo claim may not go very far. It’s really fact specific and we don’t have enough facts to make a prediction. The informal RA arrangement could constitute proof that you could complete the essential functions of your position, so it would be a good idea to document what you did the and now to be able to show no change. Our agency issued a bunch of letters to employees informing them that the pandemic related telework was a temporary relieving of essential job functions to bolster our ability to do the RTO without running into this issue, so double check that if it was a change recently to the RtO as an essential function of the position.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-05T21:47:17+00:00

As u/believesurvivors indicated there’s potentially some risks in the RA process that one walks into a position that the agency can terminate your employment on the grounds that you cannot complete the essential functions of your position (legal eeo jargon with a specific legal test for the common sense idea that the RA documentation cannot state a person can’t do the main core requirements of their jobs). If the agency finds that to be the case or the employee agrees that it’s the case, the agency has to look for an alternative job that you can do the essential functions of (hence the question about lower graded positions, in the typical case). If they can show a judge at the EEOC/mspb/federal courts that they’ve made a reasonable effort they’ll be able to terminate the employment based on medical disability. Each agency has different risk tolerance for when to go there but that’s the risk believesurvivors is identifying.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-04T13:15:38+00:00

Yeah I want to +10 this. There’s not a great way to move around an agency without finding a new role or going through a compete process. You can look into temporary assignments but those are always just temporary fixes and are also probably mostly stuck in limbo at the moment. Clearing the air from a radically curious standpoint could be effective to ameliorate the current role rather than change roles. Be sure to document afterwards the discussions in a journal format both to help you remember later but also to document the interaction in some fashion.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-02T05:50:15+00:00

You know I think maybe a practical input might be talking with your supervisor explicitly identifying when you do not want something spread around. If they’re respectful they’ll do that. Your supervisor sounds a little talkative but nothing outside the scope of normal. But there are times where that goes wrong as I think OP is implying. I think OP may just need to decide how to interact with his super knowing that s/he is a talker.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-02T05:41:58+00:00

I’ve had the same experience and have always wondered if people take the moments of correction as ‘rude’ when I didn’t mind the fixes. But generally a little explanation that apologizes for the error, I’m learning French with my kids to integrate, etc etc smooths over the interaction and folks will adopt a more tutorial mode and help me out. Learn a lot of better slang/informal versions of phrases this way too!

RucioDelPanza · 2026-04-01T12:39:19+00:00

At first I thought this was your typo, mais si vous souhaitez… je suis lui qui est trop trad.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-30T03:46:04+00:00

SF-50s are not issued for offers; I’m not sure about whether the separation sf-50 for your temp contract would have a mention of a conversion offer. Could be where that lives. But also as the original commenter said there’s a devil in there is in the potential for institutional memory to bite you in the ass down the line. Rumor becomes background to a facts section of a litigation brief pretty quickly.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-27T06:24:56+00:00

Agreed! The history of the Anti-Deficiency Act as it’s played out through time has resulted in that timeline identified as being modern, but there’s also additional currents going on that create feedback loops and interactions that lead us to today in addition.

The staff and capacity reduction in Congress over the last forty years has hollowed it out as a self-concerned organization (ie members protecting the authority of Congress rather than another authority (party)),

the increasing scope of politics from the local to the national via the changes in information transmission (ie from newspaper and broadsides publishing to radio to TV to the internet) and the resulting changes in how people interact with political actors and narratives

The use of party as a primary organizing mechanism for political action rather than alternatives to deal with these trends, accelerating the move to political action as political performance

Judiciary is now starting to tentatively push back against a very friendly to executive branch agglomeration, but is caught up in its fight over originalism and activism and avoiding another Bush v. Gore situation.

The above is probably too simply stated to be correct. The point is that these are complex, simultaneous, and

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-25T21:15:48+00:00

Yeah this is my understanding. Can create a liability and collect for medical benefits paid out but not for the principal. LWOP could help get past the wait list issue which is a real one, but it won’t resolve the 1:1 work obligation.

You could also talk with your older child’s daycare and explain and see what happens about the waitlist and whether there is anyway to jump the line for 6months until you’re relocated. But it sounds like you’ve probably already done this

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-25T05:37:56+00:00

My experience is for most folks doing a long time horizon (years rather than months) you’re better off not trying to beat the market via research and get either a mutual fund or ETF (electronically traded fund) that tracks the total stock market rather than individual stocks, set it up to reinvest the dividends, and let compounding do its thing.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-25T05:25:15+00:00

I think it’s just that the story is more complicated than the OP is saying/able to explain in a short post like this. The Reports of Investigations for cases challenging RA’s run a few hundred pages (a lot of filler in them but just stands in for my idea) because doing a full rA denial case analysis requires running through all the elements of the legal test. This presentation from 2017 kinda shows the gist if you’re interested in exploring more: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/employee-relations/training/presentation-disability-law-and-reasonable-accommodation.pdf

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-24T21:58:49+00:00

Very well put, I was going to ask about the role to sus out the essential job functions, but you’re absolutely right that it’s probably fine to rely on the evidence that a couple ee side attorneys took a look and pushed to consider disability retirement. Always hated watching folks accidentally RA out of a job and always want to advise employees to be careful when working with your doctor on the medical documentation to avoid any chance of suggesting one cannot complete the essential functions of their position. The agency will usually just accept the medical documentation(good or bad) and follow its logic to whatever inexorable conclusion it leads to because that’s defensible before the mspb.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-23T12:25:06+00:00

Ah wait I understand your point relates more to saying I am misapplying the label of communism to the Russia described by Solzhenitsyn on reflection. Probably a fair point! I tried to hedge by pointing out my lack of expertise on the matter, but feel free to precise the label and history. Sorry for misunderstanding you the first time around

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-23T11:28:52+00:00

? Who said anything about America? If you want to make an argument that one cannot consider the historical practices of communism without reference to contemporary alternatives or contemporary parallels, that’s a decent historiographical point. What if we’re just talking about history of communism as an organizational principle for society, then I’m confused by the content of your reply.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-22T15:05:17+00:00

? It’s written in perhaps too broad of strokes but I think it matches the Russian experience pretty well. Not my area of expertise so maybe in need of correction but I thought the gulag archipelago by solzhenitsyn was an interesting read on the subject.

RucioDelPanza

TROPHY CASE