Who would i be if i did not put a few more comments on this ? Well, i think lhoward was right about usng array assigment instead of shift. But, something that appears to have been over looked is the calling context.
In this section, the folloing would happen based on diffrent calling conventions :

## Implicit @_
$data = shift;

## Explicit @_
$data = shift(@_);

## Explicit void context
$null = shift();
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So, if you in fact only want one, use shift; or shift(@_);

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Calm begets calm