I’ve had 10,000 weird inexplicable bugs like this one, and every single time it was due to my own code. Whether that makes me a god among idiots is your call.

Makeshifts last the longest.

The difference between a "God" and an "idiot" is that a "God" assumes the problem is his/her own code, while the idiot, well, assumes the tools.

That's not to say the God is always right nor the idiot always wrong. But, with no evidence to the contrary, everyone here is going to assume it's your code, not your tool (perl). Post a working, testable, reproducable, standalone piece of code that shows the problem, and one of three things will happen: a) you'll find the bug yourself (this happens to me quite often - once I found my bug, then found another problem which I then posted, having a small testcase to show - and, again, if memory serves, it was me.), b) we'll show your bug (or maybe just misunderstanding or maybe just quirk that you're not following), or c) we'll confirm it's a real, live bug in the perl core. With a number of P5Porters here, you may find it fixed soon, too.

Why would I need to come back and tell you anything after I find out what the issue is?

I like pigeonholing people. So here we go again. You may need to come back to us because you don't understand why something is happening - it looks right to you, so you want some extra eyes looking at it. Or you may be the type who needs help to decipher what you've just done. Personally, I think that just coming up with a reproducable, standalone script for dissection is sufficient - I'm not sure why Aristotle wants more than that.

Now go ahead and spout off about how my post was lacking of any information that would allow you to help me at all.

I'm a results-oriented kind of guy. And I need to ask, "How's that working for you?" I mean, based solely on results, the question you posed, with the information contained therein, obviously didn't help. There are two conclusions I can draw off the top of my head (feel free to add more): a) we're all idiots, or b) you didn't provide the information that we needed in order to see and help with (or perhaps solve) your problem. Which do you find more reasonable?

Alternately, if it had been obvious to us that we did "not understand what [we] are trying to help with," we could have simply ignored your post, and you would have received absolutely zero feedback. Then you would be grumbling that no one could help you. Wouldn't you rather that we made an honest effort (remembering how much you're paying for this help) to give you feedback that perhaps your question wasn't clear enough?

Then tell me you know just how stupid I am because I could not make you understand my simple question and how you know all about me from a single post.

Here's a simple question: "What do I have in my pocket?" Gollum didn't think it so simple, either. The problem is that the question is, indeed, simple. But that's a superficial simpleness which belies a whole host of complexities. Such as "Where has the hobbitsses been, my precious?" In your case, we need more information because we can't reproduce your problem. All we can do is throw out guesses - which we have - and hope they help.

I haven't had a good downvoting in a while.

Getting snarky at free help doesn't help. You get what you pay for. And if I were your tutor or other paid help, I'd demand seeing the full, reproducable code. I demand that much of those who work for and with me (where I'm paid to help). And even my friends who have taken programming and get stuck (whether it's perl, shell, C++, Java, or languages I don't even know, such as .NET) know that they need to zip up their entire source code and email it to me so I can see their problem. Describing their problem over the phone just simply doesn't work reliably.

I, like most monks here, don't mind helping. But you need to be a willing spirit in this and help us help you.