My Perl abilities vary between "WTF?" and "wow, didn't know you could do that". I regularly forget synatx or how to do things, so my best friend is a Perl manual that also doubles as a beer mat.

I did all my training on a TRS80 and it's wonderful Basic, and graduated to Cobol, and then Perl .. WooHoo! I also had a long spell with OS/2, which was very cool.

The high point in my IT career was being told I couldn't attend a Microsoft preview of Windows for Workgroups as I "wasn't important enough". I then went into denial and vowed never to use a Microsoft product for anything more important than playing games.