The resulting series of numbers are completely meaningless without the one time pad that was used to generate them in the first place. This is where the extreme strength of this code comes from.
The downside of this code is that you have to distrubute the one time pad between you and your correspondant. This leaves you open to having the one time pad stollen or discovered because it is physically in both of your hands. Further, if you do not know your correspondant very well, you are open to "man in the middle" attacks (someone, posing as your correspondant, copies your one time pad prior to passing it along, thus being able to review your conversation at will).
Example
In this example, a simple one time pad is used. All visitors to this web site compete for the same one time pad, but all enter it at different locations. By this, I mean that this one time pad is not useful for communicating between two different parites.
The original one time pad is:
This seemingly random set of number was originally the ASCII code to the Gettysburg Address (trimed down to about 1000 characters). Then, as more and more people visit this page, it becomes slightly mutated with each visit.
To use this list of seemingly meaningless random numbers, you would keep track of which numbers you use. You and your correspondant would create a system between you. For simplicity sake, let's just read across and then top to bottom. So you would take the number 115 and then add it to the "thing to encode", for instance the ASCII value for the character 'A' (which is 64) and you would get 179. This then you would write down as your encrypted text. Next, you would highlight (or otherwise mark out) the number off of the one time pad that you used, namely 115. Then you would take the next "thing to encode" and repeat the process with the one time pad value 8.
To receive a coded message, you would then simply reverse the process. As the decoder, your one time pad doesn't have 115 marked out yet, so you would use it and subtract it from the first number in your encrypted text. Then you would convert that using the ASCII character codes to receive your plain text.
By way of example, enter your plain text below and then press the 'Run' button.
As can be surmized from the resulting text, it's kinda messy. However, when you and your correspondant are working from the same one time pad, you can decode things fairly easily back to: