Sometime around the turn of the century, I worked on an enterprise webapp (of the kind I fear may have kept IE4 in production for a long time). We'd show a popup-window with a gif of spinning gears for operations that took more than a few seconds.
At one point, we had a call from a user that had been waiting for one of these operations to finish for a long time. We looked into it and realised that some backend process had crashed, so we restarted it and told him he'd have to reload the app. The user wouldn't hear it - it was still working, he could see the gears turning!
At one point, we had a call from a user that had been waiting for one of these operations to finish for a long time. We looked into it and realised that some backend process had crashed, so we restarted it and told him he'd have to reload the app. The user wouldn't hear it - it was still working, he could see the gears turning!