Nobody likes waiting but unfortunately in the Ajax application I'm working on at the moment, there is one fair-sized pause (1-2 seconds a go) that users have to undergo each and every time they want to load up a chunk of data.

I've tried to make the load as interactive as possible. There's an animated GIF alongside a very plain, very dull "Loading..." message.

So I thought it might be quite fun to come up with a batch of 50-or-so funny-looking messages and pick from them randomly so the user never knows what they're going to see. The time they would have spent growing impatient is fruitfully used.

Here's what I've come up with so far, just to give you an idea.

var randomLoadingMessage = function() {
    var lines = new Array(
        "Locating the required gigapixels to render...",
        "Spinning up the hamster...",
        "Shovelling coal into the server...",
        "Programming the flux capacitor"
    );
    return lines[Math.round(Math.random()*(lines.length-1))];
}

(Yes -- I know some of those are pretty lame -- That's why I'm here :)

The funniest I see today will get the prestigious "Accepted Answer" award. Others get votes for participation.

Enjoy!!