Contacting Me Overseas

For those who can't remember how to reach me but want to, here's how to contact me when I'm in Africa.

 

Do NOT call my cell phone! I mean, you can, but it's going to give you a weird message because I have to take out my SIM card when I'm in Africa. If not, each voicemail costs me about $4.00 US. So, use the methods below to reach me and Cingular can't connect you to my voicemail if my card isn't plugged into my phone at the time of your call.

 

Call My Local Number: 252-565-4626
This will ring straight into my Internet voicemail while I'm gone, but it will email me the voicemail message and allow me to know I have one too, so I can check it on the web or on the phone. Otherwise, I don't have a way to know I have voicemail waiting.

 

Call my Libyan phone number: 011-218-92-744-8702
Just dial that exactly as you see it on the screen.
011- Tells your phone to connect to the international circuitboard.
218- Tells it you are calling the country of Libya
92- Is my area code (yes, it has two numbers instead of three)
744-8702- is my local number there.

Email Me: alornmage@gmail.com
Most of you know my email address, but I've been discovering some recent problems trying to connect to my american server from Libya because it appears most of the country is blacklisted... SO... instead of emailing me at tjordan@carolinaregion.com, please contact me at alornmage@gmail.com

Yahoo Me: alornmage
My username on Yahoo Messenger is alornmage, so you can contact me that way if I'm online.

Times you can reach me:
This is sometimes easy, sometimes hard. We are 6 hours ahead of you in Libya, sometimes 7 depending on the year. We are usually available all day and part of the early evening, but we have to contend with trying to get a signal through the concrete buildings, which doesn't work too well. Basically, you can get me on the phone if I'm standing outside working, or driving around the field in the truck, or eating dinner at the patio at night. If I'm in my room, you can just hang it up... no service inside the block at all.

 

The best time to reach us is as follows:
Daytime: 7AM our time until about 5PM. That equates to 1 AM Eastern until 10 AM eastern, so pretty much that means you need to call us in the mornings, because it's afternoon there already for us. If you call us after 6 PM EST, then it's after midnight there and we're already in the block and can't get your call... and even if we could, we don't want to talk to you THAT badly. lol.

I'll be quite honest about it, it's VERY lonely being stuck in a third world country, in the middle of the desert, with few people who even speak your language and we only have each other to talk to for most of a month (Tim and I) so we LOVE having folks call or email us while we're gone.

Just please do me a favor and don't email us any large email attachments if you can avoid it. Our "DSL" speeds over there are about 2-3kb/s, meaning just trying to load this web page literally takes over half an hour. (If you've been on the internet since the days of dial-up, then you'll understand this. Remember that REALLY SLOW dial-up connection you used to have? Yeah, well that's about 21 times faster than we can connect...) Loading GMAIL is pretty fast, only about 5 minutes or so to get logged in, but any large email attachment while we're there could completely shut down our emails for the rest of the trip.