The thing is that i can see all the other server's accounts on rock through pear's webpage and everything and i can even click on rock to go to it through pear. So it has to be working.
If you see the remote host in your primary server's account list that means the remote server has been set up properly under "Remote servers", but that doesn't imply that API clustering is set up properly. Remote servers will show up regardless of whether ENABLE_API_CLUSTERING is defined in config.php or "Provisioning server for API clustering" is set correctly, etc.
I'd rather not have a staff member rifle through all my passwords and everything either.
Understandable, but all I can tell you is that it does work for other folks, including myself, so if it's not working for you it's either 1) a misconfiguration on your part or 2) a bug in CC triggered by something being different about your servers versus every other client using this feature. For obvious reasons we can't diagnose either case without access to your server.
Is there a timeout or something in trying to contact the clustered servers
No. There is of course a timeout, but if it timed out that'd be treated as a provisioning error -- it wouldn't just pick another host.