I live in a dense residential neighborhood in a metro-suburb right next to Boston and have an active gas leak outside my house. You can smell it two houses in both directions.

The gas company has been here twice. The fire department once. The town fire chief actually called an emergency number at the gas company to ask them to fix it.

Guess what? No fix... 4 months and counting.

The party line the gas company has been giving me is (paraphrased)... "There are too many leaks in the area, so we are triaging. Unless the gas is actively leaking INTO the house (as opposed to outside of the house), we won't fix it for now. Given the Hurricane Sandy response in the mid-atlantic region, things are pushed back even further. We'll keep monitoring the leak. Trust us."

Uh, huh... yeah, my house is going to blow up. Or at the least, one of my trash cans on the curb is turning into a bottle rocket.

A true visionary.

The missus once gave two guys a geek-gasm by dropping a reference to CmdrTaco in a sentence. As she related the story, the guys were dumbfounded that a non-geek (and a woman no less) knew of the great and powerful CmdrTaco.

I don't know what surprised me more-- irrefutable evidence that she actually listens to the geeky things I say or that N=2 nerds congregated in public during the daylight hours.

The parent is spot on... work and home machines are different beasts entirely. What it means to boot in the home setting is a fractional subset of what needs to be accomplished on boot for a work machine.

If I may add to the list of work place boot killers...
(1) Drive decryption. In my industry, this is a government requirement and a common sense moral necessity, but dear Lord does it kill my boot time. Just getting through the login process (which precedes the boot loader) takes a minute.

(2) Drive mounts. These shouldn't stall boot, but they do. Someone with more IT-fu than I want to comment on why my Win7 computer stalls while trying to map NFS shares?