Thank you to all who replied.

I ended up solving this issue with an entirely different method. Much thanks goes to Ikegami for putting me on the right path. Here's the final code, though it's not been made into an object method yet.

#!/usr/bin/perl

$|++;
use strict;
use warnings;

our $DEBUG = 1;

my $query = $ARGV[0] || 'default data';

print client($query);

sub client {
  use IO::Socket; # <- here for when this sub grows up to become an ob
+ject method

  # do some basic setup stuff
  my $info = shift;
  return "No info!" unless ($info);

  my @ips = ('XXX.XXX.XXX.X0','XXX.XXX.XXX.X1','XXX.XXX.XXX.X2');
  my $port = XXXX;
  # grab an IP randomly
  my $index = int(rand(scalar @ips));

  # try to connect once for each IP
  my $sock;
  for (my $counter = 0; $counter < scalar @ips; $counter++) {
    # debug output
    print "Trying $ips[$index]... " if ($DEBUG);
    # try to connect
    $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(  PeerAddr => $ips[$index].':'.$port
+,
                                    Blocking => 1,
                                    Timeout  => 1, ### The key param t
+hat I had been missing!!!
                                  );
    # success!
    if ($sock) {
      print "OK!\n" if ($DEBUG);
      last;
    }
    # failure
    print "Nope\n" if ($DEBUG);
    # get previous IP (loops around if negative, pretty sweet)
    $index--;
  }

  # return error if all 3 failed
  return "no sock!" unless ($sock);

  # write to socket
  print $sock $info.$/ or die "$!";

  # read from socket and close
  sysread $sock, my ($text), 10000;
  close($sock);
  
  return $text;
}
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