My daily visit to BoingBoing caused me to do a double-take today when I saw a post entitled “American health care UI: snapshot” showing a screenshot from a computer system used at my workplace.

If I’m not mistaken, that’s a screenshot from MMIS, a system that the Minnesota Department of Human Services uses to process claims from thousands of Medicaid providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.). The post refers to it as a “‘throwback’ system that hasn’t really been overhauled for a few years.” Actually, MMIS has been around for almost 20 years and it certainly won’t win any awards for prettiest user interface. That said, this system enables Minnesota to process Medicaid claims much more quickly than a lot of other states. I’d be surprised if the claims processing systems for private insurers like Medica or Ucare look much different.

If you don’t do anything else today, read Tim Kreider’s funny and dazzling blog post in the Times about how we view the lives of friends and families through the prism of our own past choices. Since it’s impossible for us to go back in time and follow a different set of forks in the road, we quietly assess our peers’ stations and life and congratulate or berate ourselves for making similar or wildly different choices. Kreider refers to this sociological phenomenon as the Referendum and suggests that it can sometimes result in people gazing at each with incomprehension, jealousy, or smugness from across a yawning chasm of experience and circumstance. He writes:

I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.

What they also can’t imagine is having too much time on your hands, being unable to fill the hours, having to just sit and stare at the emptiness at the center of your life. But I’m sure that to them this problem seems as pitiable as morbid obesity would to the victims of famine.

Kreider’s observations are similar to my own. Beginning in my early thirties, friends began making remarks to me like “You’re so lucky to live alone.” or “It must be fun to be a bachelor living in the city.” And I would listen to their stories about spouses and partners and imagine how nice it would be to come home and have someone to talk to. Our capacity for imagination is one of our greatest assets, but it can also be a huge pain in the ass. You don’t see dogs coming home from an afternoon in the dog park and yearning for a bigger yard or feeling thankful that their master isn’t a jerk.

We use each other as the inspiration for the stories we tell ourselves, inserting our own dreams and fears into the narratives of lives that followed a different path than our own. It might not seem like a noble impulse at first because–let’s be honest–there isn’t much that’s ennobling about envying someone’s fortune or pitying their burdens. But most great works of fiction are only a couple steps removed from this kind of late-night musing.

Okay, this is just too awesome not to post. Back in the 80s, before the Internet came along, there was this thing called video dating. Video dating was aimed primarily at middle-aged people who–how to say this politely–had trouble finding dates in more traditional venues. Video dating encouraged people to be themselves in a low-pressure environment where the camera was the only audience. The idea was to say a little about yourself and about what you’re looking for in a partner. But the fee didn’t always include much in the way of preparation or coaching. To see what I mean, you have to watch this montage of actual video dating clients. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

A few things struck me as I was watching this. First, did men really dress this badly in the 80s? The guy in the reindeer sweater makes me want to weep. Second, the guy holding the rose and waxing poetic about his ideal goddess almost had me singing the chorus of “Livin’ on a Prayer”. Third, “damsel-in-distress hotline”? Really? I mean, really? Finally, if there’s any justice at all in this world, Fred the Viking warrior found someone with whom to share his love of cosplay and custom-made weaponry.

And yes, I recognize the irony of me snarking on these poor dudes while I’m sitting here in front of my computer on a Friday night. Embrace the irony: that’s my motto.

Plenty of TV sitcoms are set largely or entirely in the workplace. The best workplace sitcoms (like The Office or M*A*S*H) can both distill and exaggerate the absurdities of modern existence while still telling entertaining stories about fully realized characters. But novels centered on the workplace–especially comedic novels–are much less common. Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came To The End is such a novel and it succeeds brilliantly as both satire and a studied observation of human relationships.

The book is set in a Chicago ad agency at the end of the dot-com boom at the outset of the new millennium; massive layoffs are imminent and everyone is gripped by a crippling fear that they will be the next unlucky soul forced to “walk Spanish”–handed a pink slip and instructed to pack their things. As work dries up and morale plummets, the employees are seized by all kinds of work-induced neuroses. They worry about whether the office manager will discover that they stole a chair from a previously terminated colleague. They overanalyze the random comments of a superior. They gossip and go to great lengths to look busy.

Ferris uses the collective “we” throughout most of the book and, rather than being gimmicky, it’s a surprisingly effective narrative method. It’s a play on the sense of anonymity that pervades most corporate workplaces, but it also gives us a peek into the collective mentality of a group of people struggling to cope not only with potential job loss, but depression, anger, and loneliness. Ferris depicts the workplace as an echo chamber of snap judgments, persistent rumors, and the endless search for distraction. But that’s not to say these characters are uniformly unlikeable. They do manage to perform acts of kindness both large and small for one another, even for colleagues they don’t necessarily like.

It seems fitting to read this book in the midst of another recession that makes the previous one look like an innocuous hiccup. One of the guys in my book club mentioned that just reading this book made him anxious about his own job. Ferris has tapped into the essential insecurities that plague us in this new age. Lack of stability. Materialism. Isolation. For him, work is a deeply ambivalent force in our lives. It offers some measure of predictability in a chaotic world, but it can also drive us crazy.

So what did I do during my time without a computer? For one thing, my unread magazine pile is noticeably thinner. I finished my book club selection a week ahead of schedule, debated yet again whether to purchase an iMac, and dragged myself out of bed early on a Saturday morning to attend a presidential health care rally.

The speech itself was mostly a retread of the one Obama delivered to the joint session of Congress last week, but the speech itself wasn’t the main attraction for me. This is probably the most significant domestic policy debate we’ve had in a couple decades and, as I’m sure regular readers have figured out, it’s one that’s deeply significant to me. It didn’t feel right to stay home when the president would be just a few blocks from my house discussing the same topic that has captured most of my attention through the spring and summer. I wanted to do my small part to demonstrate my support for reform efforts. I can go on about public options and cost containment and financing mechanisms, but there’s something to be said for showing up with 15,000 other like-minded individuals to declare in one voice “Enough!”