So complete noob question, go ahead and berate me

when we switch to a different coin I seem to lose connection and feels like it takes a good while to ramp back up. That normal?
Stratum drops off and takes several seconds to restart on coin-switch. If you're running a not-ancient version of cgminer it will see the disconnect, try to reconnect, fail and put the pool on a 5-minute cooldown timer.
Either run an older version of cgminer, or (what I do) set a failover to something like Middlecoin.