For some reason $nick(,).idle is inaccurate when the idle time of a user is in hours.
Example 1:
I whois'd myself and got an idle time of "7 seconds".
I then used $nick and it also echoed "7".
However when I did it to a person who was inactive for 9+ hours, it echoed "1096". If you do the math there are 32,400 seconds in 9 hours, which means something is wrong.