If you can turn the port off and then back on remotely, perhaps you can skip the unplugging part completely? I know that some managed PoE switches even offer a button to power cycle a port.

Good point, now that you mention it, it's not turning off PoE, just stopping data. I don't know if there's a great way to handle it, and there's no way I'm shutting off the entire switch. I'll just unplug the patch panel end of the cable, instead of the switch end, so the jack I'm wearing out is one that's easy to replace.

It's just the chip the NSA put in the cable, failing to initialize first try.