These words come from one of the most renowned rappers of all time, Flava Flav (and Chuck D too, as it was a Public Enemy song, but I digress). At this point, you must be thinking where in the world is he going with this. Bear with me, there is a story here.

I, like I am sure a lot of other people, jumped on the Voice over IP (VoIP) bandwagon at the end of last year and expected grand things. The space was relatively crowded, with Vonage and SunRocket looking like the 2 most viable companies, so I chose to go with SunRocket. The reason was they were a little cheaper, they were locally based in northern virginia (always have to support the local companies when you can) and a lot of ex AOL’ers were there, so I figured they must have something right (so I thought). All was good, transfered over our old number and we were off to the races. I can say with 100% certainty that the call quality was never great, but it is the price you pay for being on the bleeding edge of technology, right?

Well, that was what I thought until Monday morning of this week. Out of the blue, good ol’ SunRocket went out of business! The last I checked, you just don’t close up shop and leave your 200,000+ customers hanging out to dry. But that is just what they did. Without any warning, they shut down service. We had to read about it in the news, no forewarning, nothing. For what it is worth, we still have limited phone service, and they are supposed to transfer their existing customers over to other carriers, but for right now we are in limbo.

This experience has taught me that next time I want to jump on the bandwagon and believe all the hype (read here: I want an iPhone), I am going to sit back and wait until all the kinks are worked out before I take that leap again.

The best planners in the world can map out every move, every details down to the most minute of details, but the one thing you can never plan for is the unexpected. They say that you should expect the unexpected, but how does one do that if they do not know what it is?

I am currently going through a personal situation that I did not expect, it came out of left field and is affecting my immediate family. None of us saw it coming, but nonetheless it is staring us in the face and we are dealing with it. It made me think, what do you do when the unexpected happens?

In business world, this could be less that optimal quarterly earnings (although if you have a competent accounting staff, it should not be a huge surprise) or in product development it could be a missed deliverable that affects the product launch. So in those situations, what do you do?

It is a tough situation to be in, as you cannot see it coming, but you need to do something, and do something sooner than later. The best course of action seems to be to assess the situation, understand your alternatives, what the risks are with each of them and take action. The worst thing that you can do is do nothing, that does not move you in any direction, whether it is the right or wrong.

No matter how well you think you know what is going on, this can happen at anytime. So what are you going to do?