>> The first time I ran the program, it finished in a couple seconds. I was sure something must have failed

At one of my first jobs I was a DBA supporting a CRUD app in the finance industry. The app had one report that took forever and usually timed out, I was told to take a look at it. The DB query was just missing a couple indexes so I added those.

After I added them, my boss told one of the users of the app to try out the report and she said it was still broken. He asked what she meant and she said she clicked the button and the page with the results came up right away. She thought it was broken because it didn't take forever.