My first gripe with the iMac

And maybe it isnt even a mac problem, but why, when I wake my iMac up, or reboot it or start it up does it take like 10 minutes to be able to connect to the network? not the internet, but the office network? What is it doing in those minutes of not even recognizing that there IS a network? Is it wondering where in the universe it is? It's just irritating that it takes so long to see the network.

Any thoughts on this?

Not sure, how are you connecting to your network? I have my iMac w/ Airport Extreme card connected wirelessly to my home network and it only takes about 10 seconds at the max to connect after a restart.

10/100 Ethernet cord to the router. Like I said, getting on the internet is instantanious, but the office network is painfully slow to even show up.

This sounds more like a problem within your network, not specifically to your Mac. The Internet comes physically over the same network, so if Internet works, the Mac has a connection to the network. I would suggest to check your authentification server (the one that manages access rights to the different servers on the network), maybe it's too slow...