Code: An Early Arrival

Code showed up to the party early. He had been to these kinds of mandatory government functions before; he wasn’t expecting much.

“I’ll just send some e-mails and display some documents with well-ordered lists, and I’ll cut out early,” he thought. He didn’t dress up. He thought he could probably get by with a blink tag .

Design: Fashionably Late

Design didn’t even really feel like going.

“It’s just going to be a bunch of math geeks who have no appreciation for me,” she thought. She wouldn’t know anyone there, and she knew they wouldn’t care that she was wearing her new earrings. She thought she’d drop in to say hello, and cut out early.

Design Meets Code

It was not love at first sight. She hated that tie. He thought she was so superfluous, he expected her to cough up a bejeweled purse dog all over his perfectly ordered lists. They argued. They fought. They spit at each other. They engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

Browser wars broke out, standards swirled in chaos, fledgling technologies were crushed, others rose to domination and millions of Web pages all over the world displayed the carnage.

A Cosmic Epiphany

Code swiped the blood away from his algorithms and took a hard long look at Design.

“I need her,” he admitted. “I am super-smart, but no one is going to use my whiz-bang functionality if they don’t like how it’s presented, or they can’t figure out how to use it. Plus, she is really hot, surprisingly intelligent, and I admire her conviction - I’m proud to know her.”

Design pushed her layout back into place and took a good long look at Code.

“I need him,” she admitted. “I am gorgeous, but I’m much more attractive and fun when I’m actually doing something. Plus, he’s pretty reliable, surprisingly passionate, and the way he manipulates digits to give me exactly what I want in only a few seconds is really exciting.”