That was also my first thought, but that:
- destroys the object if it isn't referenced elsewhere, or
- does absolutely nothing if it is still referenced elsewhere.

Basically, as it turns out, all that does is take the variable $self that previously contained a reference to a blessed object, and gives it a new value, a reference to a newly created anonymous hash. So unless $self was the only reference to the object(which it isn't in my specific case) absolutely nothing happens :-)

edit: formatting