Code/coal

At the beginning of the bubble I met a programmer at R/GA, an agency that did various kinds of media for ads and movies and had made their name doing titles for films in the 70's, most notably for Alien. We (brother, friend and I) dubbed this programmer "the Viking" because of his nordic extraction and long hair. The Viking made the keen observation that the programmer was the modern-day coal miner. He is overworked, replaceable, a low ranking member of society, his product unrefined and ubiquitous. To him, what cinched the analogy was the way the words code and coal sounded the same. He used to demonstrate, repeating "code...coal, code...coal,...", blurring the ends of the words increasingly until they did sound the same, though neither sounded like code or coal when he was through with them.