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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;supersnackbar, post: 4709224, member: 9858&quot;]It&#039;s called trend assessment and prediction.&nbsp; You see the overall direction the company is headed based on their policies and treatment of the employees in general.&nbsp; So if they are on a downhill trend, that means something is up and they are making adjustments.&nbsp; Having done this for over 22 years, I have worked mostly for privately owned companies on purpose...they tend to make decisions that keep the company profitable, but yet more employee friendly as opposed to the publicly owned business who will sacrifice employee happiness to gain profits for the stockholders.&nbsp; I tend to observe what is going on around me, both with the way I am being treated and the way others are being treated to assess the general direction of the company.&nbsp; If it&#039;s changing for the worse fast, that signals major changes and the employees need to start making plans for the future elsewhere...but if it&#039;s changing slow, it might just be the regular ebb and flow of the business cycle...or it could be the &#039;frog soup&#039; theory (put a frog in boiling water, it jumps out, put a frog in cool water and turn up the heat slow, it&#039;ll stay in the water until it&#039;s frog soup).&nbsp; I&#039;ve tried to ride out companies changes in the past and got burned.&nbsp; Now I try to gauge when it&#039;s time to pull out and move on...the best time to pop the chute isn&#039;t right before impact, it&#039;s well before so you have a controlled soft landing so you can walk away to jump another day.</p><p><br /></p><p>You care about retirement, I don&#039;t.&nbsp; My family heritage and history shows all but 1 didn&#039;t live to todays retirement age, and that 1 that did, died within the 1st year after retiring. If the trend continues, I won&#039;t retire.&nbsp; Which is why I have a LOT of life insurance.&nbsp; If 50-55k does it for you on an OTR job, more power to ya.&nbsp; I could find many many regional jobs that got me home every weekend or every other weekend making that much...I don&#039;t spend months away from my wife, kids and grand kids at an OTR job for that kind of money...if I must stay out, I need to clear 60-65k minimum.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for the benefits (insurance), if you&#039;re not a regular visitor to the doctor, it&#039;s good insurance. At least you&#039;ve got the VA as a backup in case our insurance won&#039;t cover something. But my wife is on several continuous prescriptions that the doctor needs to give her periodic check ups&nbsp; before renewing the 90 supply...and they aren&#039;t on the same 90 day renewal cycle so she see&#039;s the doctor every 2 or 3 months...and our insurance company refuses payment on 1 or 2 of these visits a year, and refuses payment on at least 1 of each prescription every year because they will randomly think I am still on Crete&#039;s insurance. Then my wife has to take time out of her busy schedule to call them up and argue with them to get her meds or appointment paid for. So for her, it isn&#039;t that great, but for me...it works because I don&#039;t use it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Tucker hit it on the head...when I posted on the Crete thread when I was there, and how I am doing it here are the same...I tell it like it is...good or bad.&nbsp; Sometimes it&#039;s venting a bit as well, but if you notice one of my last posts...it was positive.&nbsp; I do it so anyone that reads this thread can get an overall feel for things here to see if it&#039;s right for them...heck, I might be saving the company some money by warding off a driver that comes here (on a company provided airplane ticket), finds out it isn&#039;t what they expected but tries to stick it out, only to screw up and cost the company some business, then leave.&nbsp; Think of it as a public service that helps strengthen our driver pool...or else we could keep hiring drivers like the one Army guy saw a while back...that drops a trailer not once but twice because he didn&#039;t check the kingpin lock.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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