A fine, entertaining show, Sir!

I didn't twitch excessively. I wasn't wild about the multiple 'sleep' solution, but then neither were you.

I thought the use of 'at' was great.

Back around 2005 I wrote a thing for my work (as a Sysadmin at a university) that allowed people to request migration of their mailboxes from a Unix mail system to Exchange by sending an email to a particular server. It slurped their mail out of one system and into the other using IMAP, but I didn't want there to be more than about 4 'slurp' jobs running at once because IMAP is not efficient.

Anyway, long story short, I used 'at' to schedule the work and to avoid bottlenecks. Supreme lash-up but it worked :-)

Yours was a perfect hacker story. Thanks!