So today, I sent off the third in a chain of emails begging for help from one of my coworkers who might be able to help me understand why the code that she is responsible for is no longer correctly processing the input that I am sending to it, even though my input appears to be the same as the input that worked previously. Until this is fixed, I am going to make very little progress.
And immediately after sending the email, an email arrived in my inbox, letting me know about a free stress management webinar coming up next week.
Thank you, Mr. Salieri.
ETA: My coworker got back to me. It turns out that the error message that I was getting was slightly inaccurate and there was a different data item that I had missed filling in. Once I set the value for that correctly, things started working, which was very encouraging. :)