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I’ve been reading a lot, lately, about the fall of Constantinople.

(Go ahead, sing the song. I’ll wait. You k now you want to.)

I got into this topic because of The Crane Girl. I’m writing about a city that gets besieged and invaded, and I don’t know much about sieges or invasions at a tactical level (we all have our failings!), so I needed a historical model to work from. I thought the fall of Constantinople would do nicely, and I still think so.

But beyond that, it’s just a fascinating topic in its own right.

Constantinople was the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which had shrunk to practically nothing by the year of the final conquest (1453). But the term “Byzantine Empire” is a modern invention. The city’s inhabitants thought of themselves as belonging to the Roman Empire – and rightfully so. The first Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the empire from Rome to Byzantium (renaming it after himself in the process) in 324 AD, which means that the city was legitimately the heir of Rome, and its emperors were legitimately the heirs of Augustus Caesar. Since the western half of the old empire had long since unraveled, this final blow in 1453 can truly be seen as the very end (at least politically) of what Augustus built.

In spite of the very real pain and horror involved, I can’t help romanticizing the siege. This was a city that had stood for over a thousand years, that had withstood countless attacks from Christians and Muslims alike. Its grand triple walls were the stuff of legend. Its great church, the Hagia Sophia, was an ancient marvel that still stands today. The population of the city had dwindled from roughly a million to roughly a hundred thousand, and the golden palaces were decaying into ruin. The emperors reached out to the western Christian world for aid, desperately, but in vain. Constantinople even swallowed its pride and proclaimed they would reunite with the Catholic Church, nominally healing the centuries-old Great Schism, to no avail. Over the city, an atmosphere of apocalyptic doom hung like a poisonous cloud.

The final emperor, Constantine XI, seems to have been a genuinely brave and decent man. His advisers wanted him to flee the city before its downfall, but he repeatedly refused. When the walls were finally breached, on May 29, he rode into the mass of invaders in a last desperate charge and was never seen again.

The leader of the Ottoman invaders, Sultan Mehmet II, was half the emperor’s age, but seems to have had a real respect for the city he was taking. Yes, his forces killed countless civilians and ransacked many churches, but he also made an effort to spare many lives and buildings and cultural institutions, and to rebuild the old capital of Rome into the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. He even considered himself the successor of the Caesars – and his empire lasted all the way to 1923.

What will the history books say about us someday?

Let’s say you stop at an unfamiliar restaurant and don’t have a lot of time. You don’t know what’s good. You pick something more or less at random.

A crisis, surely.

Or you go someplace where the menu is full of foreign words, and you literally don’t know what you’re ordering. Or the menu on the wall is big and complicated, and there’s an impatient line behind you. Or you’re at the drive-thru, squinting at your choices in the pouring rain.

These sorts of tragedies are all too common – and I think they are preventable.

I think restaurants should have a default option.

Anytime you don’t know what to get, whatever the reason, you should be able to ask for the default – the thing that the restaurant will give you in the absence of any preference. Probably something that’s reasonably priced, reasonably tasty, and will appeal to a wide range of customers.

Diet restrictions? Well, ideally, someone who is vegan (or whatever) would ask when they order, but the restaurant could bring it up too, and perhaps even have a backup default for special cases.

What say you, hypothetical reader? Would you like to have a default option? (We could call it something a little sexier, like house favorite. Also, it’s possible I don’t know what “sexier” means.)

Can we finally end the long nightmare?

My favorite holiday is upon us. No decorations, no cards, no annoying music, nothing you’re expected to lie to kids about. Just get together with the food you like and the people you love, and remember what a sweet deal it is to have food you like and people you love.

Hey, that almost sounds like something you could do even without a holiday.

See you Monday! (Unless I don’t.)

Mediocre customer service is so common, and so often complained about, that when a company does something really amazing, I want to run through the streets like Ebenezer Scrooge, casting aside my humbugs and proclaiming the good news to the entire Internet.

Let me tell you a story.

Betsy and I bought a Whirlpool washing machine five years ago when we got the house. It worked perfectly until several weeks ago, when it started having problems that made it basically unusable.

Now, we had never registered the product with Whirlpool. We had never bought a warranty. And it’s not like the product was brand-new anyway. So Whirlpool didn’t really have any obligation to fix this. I called them up, hoping – at best – for some over-the-phone troubleshooting and an estimate for someone to come look at it.

Here’s what happened instead:

• A woman carefully wrote down all the details of the problem. She also made a point of asking whether anyone had been hurt.
• She transferred me to someone else and also transferred the details I gave her. It’s astounding how rare that is.
• The second woman asked a few more things, then scheduled a local appliance company to come inspect the appliance for free.
• She then gave me her name, told me she was personally responsible for my case, and gave me a phone number to reach her directly. I’m not sure I can remember a single other time that’s ever happened.
• The inspector came, inspected, and decided it was fixable. She ordered parts for free, and returned a few days later to fix it for free.
• The washing machine is now working perfectly.

Whirlpool rocks, pass it on.

Our washing machine has been on the fritz, so last week I was on the phone to have someone come and look at it.

Afterward, I was telling Betsy that in spite of all the stuff we say about gender equality, I still assume – if I hear a woman’s voice – that she’s probably going to schedule the inspection, and – if I hear a man’s voice – he’s probably the one who will actually come look at the appliance. Betsy said she assumed the same thing, and we were laughing about that a little.

Not that we think men or women are more or less competent at either job, or “should” have either job; we don’t. But we do make assumptions about which job a man or woman is likely to have.

And these are not unreasonable assumptions, generally speaking, as long as you keep that word probably in there. We all know that many jobs, statistically, skew heavily toward one gender or the other (whether we’d like them to or not). In such cases, you might wish that the odds of a woman having one job vs. another are 50-50. But if you think the odds actually are 50-50, I’m afraid that says less about your ideals and more about your mathematical ability (or lack of it).

So Betsy and I were laughing about how, stereotypes aside, we both knew that the person who came to inspect our washing machine would be a guy.

The appliance guy came yesterday. She was, of course, a woman.

Our story is set at 6:58 a.m. The characters are my wife and me.

And – action!

Betsy: (standing in hall, wanting to know my opinion on the shoes she’s wearing for work today)

Me: (genuinely thinking about it rather than giving a knee-jerk answer) (being pleased with myself as a husband ) Good! Those look good.

Betsy: They’re different shoes.

Me: (getting on floor and squinting to verify the difference) Yes they are. (pointing) That one.

Betsy: (silently re-evaluates her life decisions)

I tell my clients I am “precise and detail-oriented,” so don’t spread this around.