The user uses -c and,

Searching for bad blocks 224... 292... 310... 327... 341... 360...

Well the user has no idea of how long this will take.
The user is formatting a 64 MB Smartmedia card, and as you do not say
what units those output numbers are in, the user doesn't know if he
will be here overnight.

P.S., dmesg has lots of
end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 923
sd 1:0:0:2: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002
sdc: Current: sense key: Medium Error
    Additional sense: CIRC unrecovered error
Info fld=0x0
but mkfs.vfat doesn't notify the user.