The knowing laugh at Kaiser

Sorry for the blog silence this morning, but I’ve been out and about.  One of my stops was at our local Kaiser Optical Center in San Rafael.  The glasses store was emblazoned with signs telling customers that they needed to be patient because the computer system had been upgraded.  The unspoken message was that the opticians were still learning their way around the system.

Being the chatty type, I asked the gal working with me if she liked the new system.  She told me that it’s better because it doesn’t just contain local records but, instead, contains optical records from all the Northern California Kaisers.  I said (and meant), “That sounds like a really good computer system.”

A customer sitting at the next station heard me (I do have a carrying voice) and said, “Yeah, it’s a good computer system if it actually works.”

Everyone around us (about five people) burst out laughing and said things along the lines of “You got that right.”

I may have been wrong, but I thought that I was hearing a spontaneous, shared Obamacare joke.  It could have been just a comment about computers in general or about the Kaiser computer system, but the way the man said it, and the knowing looks it occasioned, seemed to me to address something larger than an update to the existing Kaiser optical computer system.