LEVEL ONE: CHARACTER SELECTION

He spawned beside me in our Verilog lab, face bathed in the blue glow of Quartus Prime like some kind of silicon saint. I’ll call him “Zandrew,” because that was literally his name and also somehow worse than Andrew.

Zandrew was the kind of man who looked like he had been rendered directly from a .bit file: structurally attractive and emotionally deprecated. He wasn’t so much alive as he was instantiated, a non-playable character in the open-world nightmare that is ECE.

I once made prolonged eye contact while asking if he wanted to “combine inputs” and he blinked and said, “You mean in the testbench?” Help.

But I still wondered: Should you (try to) date your NPC lab partner? Is this a viable path to losing one’s virginity? Let’s run a systems-level analysis.

LEVEL TWO: PROS (HIGH STABILITY, LOW POWER DRAW)

• He Would Never Cheat
  You could flash your skirt at him and he’d continue staring at the code on screen, responding with, “I think you have an off-by-one error.” Emotional unavailability? Yes. But he is loyal like a hardwired FSM.
  
• Elite Endurance
  Zandrew once debugged an ARM assembly routine for nine straight hours with nothing but a protein bar for sustenance. You want commitment? He literally commits code.
  
• Completely Predictable
  You always know what Zandrew is going to do—because he’s running a main loop and hasn’t updated his firmware since Frosh.
  • Dialogue Option A: “Wanna grab food?”
    [Zandrew is compiling.]
  • Dialogue Option B: “Wanna hang out?”
    [Zandrew is debugging.]
  • Dialogue Option C: “Do you like me?”
    [Syntax error: unexpected token ‘feelings’.]
    

LEVEL THREE: CONS (LAGGING USER INPUT)

• Romantic I/O? Doesn’t Exist.
  He thinks “touch starvation” is a new sensor module. You could sit on his lap and he’d ask if you wanted to split the lab report PDF. I once wore bondage gear to the lab, with red lipstick to match. He complimented my waveform timing diagrams.
  
• Dates Require Three Weeks’ Notice and a GitHub Issue
  You want a spontaneous dinner? Too bad. His idea of quality time is running ModelSim together in complete silence.
  
• Zero Mods Installed
  Zandrew has worn the same generic engineering hoodie since orientation. There is no character customization. Only inputs, outputs, and silent lab rage.
  

LEVEL FOUR: HARDWARE INTERRUPT

There was a moment after 5 hours of us soldering and collectively inhaling lead fumes where I thought he might kiss me. He looked into my eyes, leaned slightly forward, and said,

“Can you double-check my frequency response test script file?”

Reader, I had to reboot emotionally.

Still, there’s something comforting about loving a man who thinks courtship is submitting pull requests on time. Zandrew might be emotionally constipated, but he will always label his signals, and he will always back up your work. That’s not nothing.

FINAL SCORE: 7/10
Recommended for: Nerds with a saviour complex and anyone who gets turned on by clean code.

Achievement Unlocked: You Dated a Man Who Thinks Endless Studying Is a Personality
Bonus XP: +20 Patience, +10 HDL Fluency
Side Quest Unlocked: Interpreting Romantic Subtext on Piazza