"I was dreaming when I wrote this. Forgive me if it goes astray. But when I woke up this morning, coulda sworn it was judgment day."

First of all, I'd like to apologize to Prince for being roughly the one-millionth person to quote the opening lyrics to "1999" way out of context (at least I didn't use the "lion in my pocket" part). But if you look around the telecom industry at the moment, it might remind you a lot of 1999--and if you are an executive that has in some way been associated with one of several stock option scandals going on at the moment, it also might very well feel like judgment day.

A story in Sunday's New York Times looked into the rise and fall of Jacob Alexander, the co-founder and former chairman and CEO of Comverse Technology, a software firm that excelled in recent years on the back of the mobile multimedia boom. Alexander and two other former Comverse executives have been charged with securities fraud in an alleged stock option back-dating scheme, and Alexander, who resigned from Comverse earlier this year, is reportedly a federal fugitive.

The scandal hasn't slowed Comverse's growth strategy, as the company announced today that it plans to acquire Netonomy.

But Comverse isn't the only company carrying a whiff of stock option scandal. Juniper Networks said in May it was undergoing a federal investigation related to stock options. Then there's VeriSign, also under investigation over stock options practices. Len Lauer, who was ousted from Sprint this week, was one of two members of the VeriSign board of directors and compensation committee to resign his appointment late last month.

The list of ongoing or recently reported stock options investigations goes on and on, and if you thought the telecom industry was past this kind of scandal, you're not alone. The industry has been bouncing back, at least in moderation, for the last few years. Along with the sober rebound, we have written about and been told of how the telecom industry has learned the hard lessons of good operational and financial management from mistakes made by the generation of leadership in charge during the telecom boom of the late 1990s.

Perhaps, we can still say we have learned those lessons and have put earlier mistakes in the rearview mirror. In some cases, the current round of investigations targets criminal activities that allegedly occurred during that same period and are just now coming to light.

So, maybe this is still part of an industry hangover we thought we had recovered from. Whether or not that's the case, new news of scandals brings back all the old feelings: If there are criminals in our midst, we want them punished, and we want to know what companies involved will do to win back our trust.

On a completely different note, don't forget to register for Telephony's IPTV Workshop at this year's Fall VON trade show in Boston on Monday, Sept. 11. You can register now, right here.

E-mail me at doshea@telephonyonline.com.