IIRC I'd been given a project to do, writing some additional functionality for a VB app. My knowledge of VB was limited to VBA. A colleague (who had originally written the VB app in question) had a project to extend the functionality of a cgi/perl based LDAP performance monitor. We arranged to swap projects because I did at least understand CGI & LDAP, if not perl.

He loaned me "CGI Programming in perl", and once I found out how easy both CGI and LDAP were in perl, I was hooked.

After that it was a little while before I encountered regexes - some of my early scripts located text delimiters using code like this:

my $counter=0;
my $var;
while ($var ne "#")
{
 $var = substr($string,$counter,1);
 $counter++;
}
[download]

After I discovered regexes, I was even more impressed by perl, and it rapidly became my #1 tool for sysadmin scripts etc. In the last two or three years I've started to approach perl as a programming language, rather than just a tool for writing easy scripts, and once again it never fails to impress.