Let's see. Back in '92 or so, I was running a Help desk for a small local ISP. The sysadmin then, asked me to learn Perl, so I could help with with some CGIs he wanted to write. However, at the time, I just didn't feel like it, and told him 'meh'. What a shame.

Skip a few years forward, I was about to finish my EE degree, and started working for a large semiconductor companey as an engineer. When I started there, they gave me a Spark2, access to a whole room full of O'Reilly books, and two months, and said "Learn whatever you want". I picked up vi, emacs, awk, sed, and perl. We actually didn't use it for CGIs there, but for the "Extracting and Reporting" part of it :).

A few years after that, when I got my first Sysadmin job (and was introduced to Linux), perl was everything I ever wanted it to be. I don't think I've written in any other language since.

-- Dan