I've met relatively few people who do Perl because that's what the job happened to be, and I teach Perl for a living so I've run into a lot of people starting their Perl careers.
Fortunately, when I started my sysadmin career, learning Perl and programming a few scripts was my first task. Happily enough, I found myself having fun, learning a lot of new things (e.g. regular expressions) and ended up thinking in Perl even when programming in other languages, that now seem much less powerful to me.
The best part is that I need Perl for my every day job, I love it very much and it's a lot of fun, so it makes me very happy.