Workaround for manually updating/correcting email within an individual contact.

I contacted help desk who said there is a known bug in updating/correcting an email address in a specific contact.  They offered the below workaround, but I still can't figure out how to do or what the below means.

I keep getting error message "This email address already exists in your account." (which isn't the case)

From online chat w/help desk:

While we work on an overall fix, we have the following solution to offer you in the meantime, you can try this workaround.

1. As a workaround please add the email you're attempting to change it to, using the "Type or Paste Contacts" option.
2. Then, change the email address to something different, ie "[email protected]", but DO NOT delete it yet.
3. Once this is done, you should be able to update the original contact and delete the contact you changed in the previous step.