I found my problem - it’s not related to a quiet chat but I will report my findings because there is something I find odd about it. Also, another symptom I observed is that I could not read anything from the socket buffer.
My NICK in my python script included a capital. When I changed it to lowercase it worked. What I find odd is that it seems new accounts can be made with capital letters but it seems they get converted to all lowercase. That’s how I noticed - I made a new account with capitals, saw it got converted, then used lowercase. Then I thought to use lowercase on my old account and it worked.