I came into Perl via a sysadmin path. It's 1995 and My Company was 'right-sizing', and decided that they didn't need five main-frame system programmers (after all they just sit around all day and read computer manuals....). Three of us were told that we had 90 days to find a position within an other group, or "it's been nice....". Real Sweet.

There was a Unix-Admin II position open in the Mail Services division, and so I went there. I really didn't know Unix (Solaris 2.6), but the Manager told me "I can teach you Unix, I can't teach you how to solve problems. I want you as my Bug Hunter." A couple of months later we got hit by one of the Mail-born viruses that were so popular in the mid-90's. I got handed the 'spam-guard' script and told "Find the filter logic in this and add another trap for the Virus!", while everyone else ran around shutting down servers, trying to limit the damage. I managed to do in about five minutes (Look for stuff I knew we were blocking, Cut and Paste and change the search pattern), and we restarted the the filter on one of the backup mail-servers. It cut our new-infection rate to zero with in the first five minutes so we rolled it out to the other external Mail Servers. We spent the next 72 hours cleaning up the pieces of all the internal servers and peoples desktop machines. We had two re-infections (people taking their laptop home and then bringing it back into the building), but the revised filters did just what they were supposed to.

When we were finally breathing normally again (about a week later), I asked my boss "What WAS that language? That 'filter' looks like an explosion in a type-factory." She said "It's Perl. It's a right powerful tool, but we don't have anyone on staff who really can really write it." "Oh", I said.

It has been all up-hill from there.