I've always been one to live life on the bleeding edge. I had a Macintosh in 1984. I was the first one on my block with a personal computer, a CD player, cable TV, a color monitor, a cable modem, a laptop computer and a cell phone. But they call it the bleeding edge for a reason. A company named SunRocket died today and now I find myself with a phone that is, in essence, a brick.

I've known all along that SunRocket was going to die. I first learned about SunRocket in December 2005 when I was desperately trying to find a new job. I had just been laid off from a government agency two weeks before Christmas and got a call from a recruiter about a job at SunRocket.

What's SunRocket? They were a VoIP company -- that's Voice over Internet Protocol. Rather than hooking phones up to the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line in your house, they give you a device to connect your internet service with your phone. Since they don't use the POTS line, they don't incur POTS charges from the local telephone company. Companies like SunRocket and Vonage passed along the savings to the consumer.

The day I interviewed for the SunRocket position, they were just moving from tiny little offices down the street to a new offices two stories above an actual Tiffany & Co. store in the posh Tyson's Corner neighborhood in Northern Virginia.

It was three days before Christmas and the SunRocket offices were in a shambles. The receptionist was an aging, ditzy, airhead who obviously hadn't been with the company very long. She didn't really know any of the employees, so her attempts to discern the whereabouts of the head of technology had her all befuddled. Finally, Greg Dupertuis, the director of application development, wandered into the receptionist area looking for me.

Greg apologized for the state of disarray in the office and took me on a tour of the company's new digs. Wires were strung loosely from the ceiling to the floor in areas that were marked "Accounting" and "Marketing", but there were no desks or partitions -- just boxes of equipment.

The most activity was coming from a meeting room that was packed with people and computers at every desk. Greg explained that they were working in the room temporarily, waiting for their cubicles to arrive in a few days. We passed more rooms, alternately full or empty, depending upon whether they had desks or not.

Finally he ushered me into his office and was in the middle of asking his first question of me when he was called away with a problem. It seems that problems were the order of the day at SunRocket. A few minutes later, two younger fellas walked into the room and introduced themselves to me as the people I'd be working with, if I were hired.

It was as if I had walked into the tent where Hawkeye and Trapper John slept in M*A*S*H. They explained that last-minute problems were always popping up at SunRocket, and that the head of technology was always putting out proverbial fires of one kind or another.

In between the caustic barbs and bitterly sarcastic jokes about the VoIP biz, Hawkeye and Trapper John asked a couple of vague questions about Unix and Java, which I tried to answer between all the yelling they were doing on short phone calls during the proceedings. I've been on a lot of job interviews in my life, but I never felt so... avoided.

It wasn't long before I was escorted to the elevators, without even seeing Greg again. The whirlwind interview had taken all of 25 minutes or so, and I doubt I spoke more than 100 words in all that time.

As I rode down the elevator, I thought to myself, "Well, it wasn't the worst interview I had ever had. That had happened just a month or so earlier when I interviewed with a company that advertised for a web developer, but it was certain from the start of the interview that they wanted a database administrator -- something I just couldn't do for them.

Still, it was certain that I was not a viable candidate for the job at SunRocket. They hadn't even asked me any real questions.

The week after Christmas was quiet and I got to spend New Year's weekend in Memphis, Tenn., watching my alma mater win the Liberty Bowl. When I got back to town, I got an email from the recruiter stating, "Just wanted to let you know that they are going to be coming with offer..."

I shook my head in disbelief. Maybe he who says the least gets the most.

There was just one nagging thing on my mind: the state of VoIP. Vonage was the pioneer in the VoIP space. I had known about them since 2003 and had suggested that we get Vonage service when we were running our own little videography service back then. In the meantime, Vonage had grown to a couple of million subscribers and several other little companies were popping up as well. SunRocket was one of those companies and had grown to the second largest VoIP company by being a low-cost alternative to Vonage.

I started doing research on VoIP and found that there were too many companies willing to give VoIP service away in exchange for something else. Microsoft gave it away with their XBox Live service. Skype gave it away to promote its SkypeOut service. Apple gave it away in iChat to promote the sales of its computers. Of course, these services were more limited than Vonage or SunRocket, but free is free.

I tentatively took the SunRocket offer, but kept pounding the pavement for a better gig. I got a couple of more interviews -- one at Sprint/Nextel and the other for the Department of Defense. The folks at SunRocket wanted me to start the day after Martin Luther King Day, but I managed to put them off for another week in order to see if I could get something better.

But the other companies interested in me were dragging their feet. Sprint/Nextel went with a different candidate and the Department of Defense changed contracting companies for the job I was vying for there. So on a cold, rainy Monday morning I trudged on the bus to go a few miles down the road to Tyson's Corner.

I got off the elevator on the third floor and reached for the glass door to the receptionist's office at SunRocket.

Locked.

I could see people mingling around inside. The place was still a shambles -- boxes and wires strewn every where. I pulled on the door again and was just about to knock when my cell phone went off.

It was the new contractor for the Department of Defense job. I backed away from the SunRocket door and stood in the corner of the elevator lobby. The contractor offered me the job and I accepted immediately. I pushed the down arrow of the elevator and disappeared from SunRocket a few moments later.

I emailed the SunRocket folks my apologies and received two responses. The one from the manager of human relations, who I had never met, was kind, but probing. She wrote, "It would be helpful for our recruiting efforts to know why SunRocket is no longer attractive to you. Is it location, size of the company, the fact we're venture capital-backed, etc.?"

My SunRocket recruiter was a bit angry. He wrote, "We had turned three other folks away and were excited for your start. Now we have lost them all including
you. This hurts."

Well, as it turns out, I probably did those other three candidates a favor. According to press accounts, SunRocket fired most of its Virginia-based employees on July 3 -- without severance. I sure would have hated to be one of those guys.

The bad blood between me and my SunRocket recruiter didn't last either. Six or eight months after I turned him down, he was calling me to see if I had changed my mind about the SunRocket job. I told him I was perfectly happy in my current job. He made me promise to call him if I changed my mind.

Even though I didn't become a SunRocket employee, I became a customer. About a month after turning down the job there, I started using their phone service. And I was a happy customer until it all shut down today.

But that's life on the bleeding edge.

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