Solved.

So here’s the issue.

Django apparently keeps a cache of objects that it doesn’t think have changed anywhere. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) Since celery was updating my object in the db outside of django, it had no idea this object had changed and fed me the cached version back when I said user.get_profile().

The solution to force it to grab from the database is simply to regrab it with its own id. Its a bit silly, but it works.

speaker = user.get_profile()
speaker = Speaker.objects.get(pk=speaker.id)

Apparently the django authors don’t want to add any kind of refresh() method onto objects, so this is the next best thing.

Using transactions also MIGHT solve my problem, but another day.

Update

After further digging, its because the user model has a _profile_cache property on it, so that it doesn’t refetch every time you grab the profile in one request from the same object. Since I was using get_profile() in the echosign function on the same object, it was being cached.