Prime Time Presser

I'm sorry I've been MIA. I was sick for several days last week and I thought I would spare you the details of having the flu despite having the flu shot. I generally try not to call in sick, especially if I'm scheduled to be at the White House. (I don't want to miss anything and there are only a very small pool of people who can replace me. It's not that I'm irreplaceable but there are only a few of us that are there on a regular basis!) But sometimes when you can't actually get out of bed, it's generally frowned upon to go to work and sit in a very small closet-sized booth with three other people and sharing germs. So instead, I spent several days on my couch sleeping and watching mindless TV.

But this is a new week and I'm feeling much, much better! And it's already a busy week. POTUS is traveling three days this week (I'm only traveling one) and last night was his first prime time press conference. Now that I think about it, it was my first prime time press conference too. I don't think Bush did one at night while I've been on the beat. At least I was scheduled to work during one. But anyway, I digress. The fact that yesterday was day 20 of the administration and POTUS's first presser, I knew it was already going to be a mess. But the pressure was really on yesterday! Added to that is that I still had about 1000 e-mails to catch up on reading from when I was sick so I felt like I was swimming upstream in information. But it seemed to all go off without any glitches. Oh with the exception that my new friends in the new POTUS administration still don't quite know what they are doing and literally an hour before the presser, they ditched the finalized seating chart that they had taken 30 hours to create. It seemed that they took all the names and put them in a hat and spilled them out onto a table and wherever they landed is where that person sat. In the past, there is some rhyme and reason as to who sits where but an hour before the presser, we were moved from the front row to the middle of the third row. Whatever, not a huge deal but it was just a hassle to move everything that we had wired up to the middle of the third row. And a blogger sat in our original seat. I know these things are not ones that the average American is concerned about but for about five minutes last night, it was a huge deal! :)

I stood in the back of the room and I was on the phone with the control room in NY. The problem was that I didn't have my hands-free device and so I held the phone to my ear for about ninety minutes. I thought POTUS kept staring at me while he was speaking but really it was just because I was directly behind his teleprompter and in his direct line of sight. And apparently I was within the cuts camera range so I was getting e-mails from friends who saw me on TV. I tried not to outwardly yawn after I got the first message. I didn't get to take notes or anything that would have made me look like I was paying attention but I assure you I was. I'm pretty sure I could have passed a pop quiz afterwards!