Today I remembered
I use the case_when function to clean up data entry issues and I was stumped for a bit when my common structure did not work.
I am prone to messing up a case_when statements but I was getting frustrated after a few failures and non helpful error messages. I isolated the problem down and realized the pattern is that the case_when statement was not working on ordinal level variables. I changed the data type of these variables to character and was back in business.
Check your data types when a function or script is not working as expected.