I was working at a company that had an existing voice mail product, and they were adding the ability to access your voicemail via the web. I was doing the back-end to integrate them and whipped up some tools in Perl to test sending and receiving UDP datagrams.

The web part was pointedly not using Perl, because the CTO was convinced that it absolutely had to be apache modules written in plain C (not C++, can't afford the extra overhead!) for absolute maximum performance when retrieving the data from an SQL database and before passing it off to an XSL engine to turn it into a web page. Shockingly, this was one of his least-bad decisions.