This is Highway 75, the Telecom Corridor on the east side of Dallas where all the telecommunications companies like Nortel and Alcatel set up shop. When telecom collapsed a few years ago, the Telecom Corridor became one big smoking crater. Of the 210,000 computer workers in DFW, 30,000 got tossed out on the street.

The big silver box building on the left houses Excel Communications, famous for being the worst IT shop to work for in Dallas. The executives are all salesmen who know nothing about the technical services they provide, so they give impossible orders to their technical staff. They couldn't find a CIO for months at a time and their systems were held together with string and chewing gum. DFW is a small job market and you get to know people who have worked everywhere. Word gets around. Everyone from Excel has crazy stories to tell. My favorite was the daily backup job that took 25 hours to run.

A technical recruiter told me that he could call Excel any day of the week and find somebody who wanted to leave. Their longevity rate there was under a year. It was more like a halfway house for laid off computer people looking for a quick temporary job while they looked for a real job.