Also the pool's vardiff is sending difficulty 1024 work for a 0.xxxx difficulty coin which is a recipe for failure.
Me and the roommate had a chuckle at that one

It does make you wonder. I have a different rig where the pool's vardiff implementation is setting the required work difficulty as high as 4K+ for a difficulty 9 coin

I thought it might be something off in the CGMiner display, but nope:
Connected to .rigs.eu.betarigs.com diff 4.23K with stratum as user
Block: bb162031... Diff:9 Started: [22:26:05] Best share: 10.4M
[2014-01-29 22:26:05] Stratum from pool 0 detected new block
[2014-01-29 22:26:08] Pool 0 difficulty changed to 4226.383859
Ouch.