The Almost-Done Progress Bar

The Almost-Done Progress Bar is a small, polished brass object, about the size of a paperback, with a single thin bar glowing softly blue across its front. The bar sits at 97 percent. It has always sat at 97 percent. There is no cable, no app, no pairing process and absolutely nothing for it to be measuring, which the instruction booklet explains on page one, so that nobody wastes an afternoon looking for the thing it is supposed to be downloading.

Nobody asked for this. The modern world already produces more unfinished progress bars than anyone could possibly need. The designers added a little jitter routine anyway, so that every few minutes the bar creeps up to 98 percent, holds there hopefully for a moment, and then quietly slides back. A line of small text underneath gives the estimated time remaining as “a moment”. It has said “a moment” for two years, and it shows no sign of changing its mind.

The strange part is what people actually do with it. Owners tend to keep it on the desk during the hardest stretch of a long piece of work: the middle, where nothing looks finished and giving up seems perfectly reasonable. It sits among the books, the notes and the half-empty cup of tea, glowing steadily. Having something else in the room that is also nearly done, and also not done, turns out to be oddly comforting. It is not encouragement, exactly. It is company.

One owner, a writer who kept it beside an inkwell while finishing a very long book, reported that on the night she wrote the final sentence, the bar reached 100 percent, held there for most of an evening, and then reset itself to 97 by morning. The manufacturer says this is not possible, since the bar is connected to nothing. The owner has kept the box, the receipt and a photograph, and says she does not need anybody to believe her.

Behind the joke is a feeling almost everyone knows. Big projects, whether a school essay, a garden, a jigsaw puzzle or a spring clean, often feel slowest just before the end, when most of the work is done but the last small stretch refuses to finish. That final few percent can seem to take as long as everything that came before it. Knowing that the feeling is common, and that it passes, can make the stubborn middle and the long last lap a little easier to bear.

So you do not need a brass progress bar to get through the tricky end of a task, although it would look very handsome on a desk. Make a cup of tea, do one small piece, and then another. Remind yourself that “almost done” is still a very good place to be, and much further along than “just started”. And when you finally reach 100 percent, take a moment to enjoy it. Unlike some progress bars, you have genuinely earned it.