That's because we need `start` to match the first 250ms offset for the timer; otherwise we won't see the time intervals we expect and the test will fail. Waiting for the second boundary is a cheap approach to get that, cause there's still plenty of room to wait for the offset after the timer's been created.

Think in what would happen if the timer was created *after* the 250th millisecond in a given second. Ticks would be held back until the next boundary; that's not a problem. In that case, you could set `start` at the next second. But... how can you actually know whether the ticker was "effectively created" before or after the offset? There's nothing telling you what decision `NewTicker()` took, if the 250ms boundary happens to be precisely when the function was called.

Does that make sense?