White House Intern Spent Nobel Morning Answering Every Norwegian Number, Just in Case

WASHINGTON — A 21-year-old White House intern spent Friday morning answering every incoming call with a +47 country code, after the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee told this year’s Peace Prize winner, “If you see a Norwegian number calling, please pick up.”

“My instructions were to grab anything from Norway on the first ring and say ‘He accepts,’” said Hollis Fjordman, a political science junior from Bemidji, Minnesota, who reported to a borrowed desk at 4 a.m. “I said it 41 times.”

According to Fjordman’s call log, the accepted calls included a Bergen seafood exporter confirming a 400-pound frozen salmon order, a cruise line offering a $50 onboard credit, a dentist’s office in Tromsø reminding someone named Ingrid about her cleaning, and an older man who said “Ja?” and hung up, which Fjordman logged as “verbal acceptance, pending paperwork.”

The prize ultimately went to Navi Pillay, an 85-year-old South African jurist and ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice, whom the committee could not reach at all. Pillay learned of the award from colleagues at a conference in Nuremberg, where she said it “must be a joke” and that, as a lawyer and a judge, she still wanted to verify it.

“She didn’t even pick up,” Fjordman said, holding a phone on 3% battery. “We picked up for her, like, forty times.”

Fjordman acknowledged one error: a call from The Hague he sent straight to voicemail because the Treasury Department had sanctioned the International Criminal Court that same morning. “Anything Dutch with ‘court’ in it, I figured, was a no,” he said.

When this reporter left, Fjordman had been told to keep the line open through the weekend in case of a recount, and was hanging up on Sweden as a matter of principle.