My name is Joe Connolly, and for almost 35 years I worked in a steel mill. My father worked there, so did my grandfather. It’s long, hard work but I’m strong and it’s what I grew up with and I never thought of doing anything else.

When I got into my late 40s the work started getting to me. I had arthritis all over my body, bad knees and breathing problems. For a long time I just sucked it up and went to work. I had to take more sick days but never enough where the company wrote me up. I had hardly ever gone to a doctor before but my kids finally made me go, and he said it was mostly just wear and tear, something he would expect to see.

I should say that I live in a company town, so the doctors aren’t usually on the patient’s side, they’re on the steel mill’s side. Maybe I should have gone into the city to see a better doctor, but that would take a whole day and I never did it. Read more here.

The harder it got for me to work, the more I started thinking about retiring. But my pension doesn’t kick in until I’m 60 and that’s a long way off. The only way out is a medical retirement and there’s no way the doctors in my town were going to give it to me. I got more and more sure I was going to die on the floor of the mill.

Then a great thing happened, I was talking to my union rep and he told me that a while ago someone else was in the exact same situation, until he got a fake doctors note saying that he couldn’t work anymore. I was pretty doubtful since the company knows all the doctors here, but he said to make the documents all from a hospital in the big city and not from our town.

One week I was pretty desperate because I could barely move enough to get out of bed and go to work, so I decided to give the fake doctor letter thing a try. I found a great site that had all kinds of fake notes, so I had my wife download them and play around. She came up with some really official looking stuff saying I wasn’t fit to work anymore, and I gave it to my union rep.

And before I knew it, the company sent me a registered letter saying my disability retirement had been okayed, at full pay. I’m writing this in my third month of retirement and I can’t remember being so happy and relieved. My union guy did the best thing for me that anyone ever did, other than my wife.