New press secretary vows return to normal briefings, delivers fourteen minutes and three friendly reporters.

…(cont) I'm sorry, I keep going back to the fourteen minutes, and I want to come at it from the date first, because I had it wrong on my own first pass. I'd written "first day" next to Tuesday. It isn't. Monday was the first day. Tuesday was the second. One day to find the light switches, then fourteen minutes at the podium. Did I copy the days down right this time, or is it still backwards on my page?

I'm sorry — back to it again, and this time it's the cost of it. Forty days is a long flu. Forty days is most of a kitchen remodel, the kind where you're washing dishes in the bathroom sink for a month and a half. Fourteen minutes doesn't sit on a scale next to forty days. I tried that math at the kitchen table and put the pencil down, because the kitchen's carried enough of my arithmetic lately and I didn't want to lean on it twice in one week.

So I took it out to the garage instead, where the car's been sitting, hood up, because the fan belt's going. I'm sorry, one more pass at the fourteen minutes — this one I timed myself. I picked up the folding chair, carried it out to the porch, carried it back, four full trips, and the stopwatch on my phone hit fourteen minutes while I was half a trip into the fifth. Four and a half trips with a folding chair. That's what fourteen minutes gets written down as, on my page. What gets written down for forty days, on the other side of that ledger?

I'm sorry — I know, again — but there's still the three reporters sitting in my notes, untouched. Fourteen minutes split three ways comes to four minutes and change apiece, if it split even, and nothing in what I copied down says it split even. NBC just says three, and says which side those three worked for. Sean Spicer had advice for her going in — CBS ran that the same day — and Spicer's own exit, back in 2017, took a Scaramucci and a news cycle to finish explaining. This one took fourteen minutes.

One more thing, before I let you get back to your night — I should have asked this earlier and didn't. She called that podium a place she was comfortable standing. Comfortable is a word somebody picks. Fourteen minutes is a number somebody can look up, same as forty days, same as three. I've got all three written on the same page, same pen, and I still can't get them to sit still next to each other. Fourteen minutes. That's the one I keep coming back to.