Have you ever watched a health check fail, even though the process was still doing useful work? I spent two days chasing that exact pattern after a deploy that looked boring on my laptop. The service came up, the retries fired, and then the client declared the whole thing unreachable. Why would a timeout that passed locally start collapsing as soon as I left my own machine? This is not a retry-storm recap, and it is not a performance bake-off with invented numbers. These are field notes from ...