I received my quarterly dividend check from my former employer, D&E Communications (d/b/a PCS One).  $35 exactly.  After taxes and gas to make the deposit, it should buy me breakfast at CPD.  Maybe.

D&E was a fun company to work for, but I wouldn’t want to be there now.  I came on board just as PCS One was launching (January 1998), which meant I was there for the dot-com/tech bubble.  The best thing I can say about D&E was that they kept a lot of their dot-com-era perks running long after the bubble burst.  In fact, that’s about the only good thing I can say about them.  Their board is worthless, their operations are more bureaucratic than any government agency, and their service is tepid at best.

In 2001, they made a failed attempt to acquire Conestoga Wireless, a small regional carrier service State College / Williamsport / Reading.  When that failed, they threw a tantrum and sold PCS One off to Voicestream (now T-Mobile).  From my understanding of the deal, D&E tried some zero-hour bullying to get Voicestream to raise their buying price for PCS One.  Voicestream balked and walked away, ruining whatever semblance of plans D&E had.  By the end of 2001, D&E was desperate to unload PCS One (despite our consistently massive growth and profitability), and had agreed to Voicestream’s terms of purchase.  This whole deal pretty much ruined any remaining respect us “PC-1″ (as our customers called us) employees had for D&E.

The point of my story?  The last laugh came today when I checked D&E’s stock price.  High-flying with a peak of $35 during the PCS One days, D&E is now putzing along at around $9 a share.  Sweet.