My first thought was using sleep, too, but he is.

So, maybe that long of a sleep is giving the CPU fits? when I had this problem before, and wasn't using a sleep command, I solved it using sleep 1 which gave the CPU plenty of time to catch up on other things.

I can't imagine a company setting a policy against using one of the most powerful friends a sysadmin has. Amazing what people do.... But, I've an open mind. Convince me that prohibiting the use of cron is a good idea.