foiled again
I went through a whole long process of researching, trying, failing, trying again, debugging, and head pounding, trying to connect to my mac from work over SSH. Finally I asked my local mac and all-around computing supergenius for help.
The IS department at my company has not only blocked the SSH port, but their hardware firewall does active sniffing to root out and destroy any attempts to make any outgoing SSH connections, no matter what port you try. How they figure that their mission of protecting company resources requires them to block outgoing encrypted connections, I have no idea.
god damn power hungry fascists.