Home working - a boon to productivity?

As a general rule I work from home one day a week. There are a number of reasons for this:

(1) It saves me a significant amount of travel time
(2) It saves me the cost of a train ticket
(3) I can get on with work with few, if any, distractions
(4) The coffee is better
(5) I can take my daughter to school

In general terms, the time I save not having to travel to work is extra time I spend working. On top of this, having fewer distractions means that I am much more productive with my time, so it's a win-win scenario. There are of course some things that I really need to be in the office for - meetings of various types, and also to be available for people to come and discuss issues with me. This is all part and parcel of the job, but when I have a specific task to accomplish they can feel more like distractions than anything else.

However there are times when it doesn't go as smoothly as I'd like. This morning I logged into the internal network as usual and was able to pick up my email, but then it all went dead. I tested basic connectivity (I could surf the web, which proved that the local wireless link was working, the ADSL Router was successfully connected to the internet, DNS and local DHCP were working etc) so it was definitely a problem with the software for accessing the company's network. After trying various things I resorted to a telephone call to our support teams, who after going through all the basic networking possibilities (why is it they can't trust me when I say that the problem is neither with the Wifi nor the ADSL link?) recommended enabling a service then rebooting the PC. After this, it all came back to life.

So yet another cycle of having to close down all my applications, reboot the entire PC and then wait for ages for everything to start up again, followed by trying to figure out what I was doing previously. What is it with the mentality of 'reboot the PC' after making any changes? Anyone would think this is the way things should happen.

Still, at least I could drink the coffee that I had roasted myself last night while I was doing all of this. It all didn't seem quite as painful as a result...