I'm Not Going to Work as a __________!

People applying for disabilty come from a wide variety of work backgrounds. Become disabled can be really bad for the ego and for some people even soul crushing. One day your independently supporting yourself and/or loved ones and then you're not. If the job was a decent or well paying job or one that someone had done for a long time and took great pride in the blow can be even that much greater. As Americans we like to say that honest good work is honorable. That's not really true though. We have a hierarchy or class system of sorts. It's not as bad as in much of the world but we have it. When you apply for disability the Social Security System wants to know if there is ANY TYPE OF JOB YOU COULD DO. And if there is you won't qualify. The only exception possibly is if you are 50 or over. I won't go into that here though. Regardless though if your attitude is "I was a foreman at a quarry I'm not going to sit down at some desk job!" or "I was making $25 an hour. I'm not going to go to some job and just make $12 an hour. I'll sit at home instead" it's not going to help your case. Now without getting into more specifics here what seems like a simple question/subject here in reality is not. So whether there is any job you could still do becomes a complicated question. That's where good lawyering comes in.

On a closing note I remember when I did some family law for a period of time and I sat though a lot of child custody and child support hearings. The Judge would always say to the unemployed male, "We'll why don't you go get a job flipping burgers or something." Now what if that Judge's son or grandson came to him and said "Dad/Grandpa I'm going to work flipping burger as a career maybe become a manager there."