I came from a C background (having done mostly BASIC and Pascal in college).  I'd been meaning to learn Perl for several years, but hadn't found the right approach to fully immersing myself in it.  I had already fallen in love with Linux, using it at home while using Unix at work.

The thing that gave me the chance to learn Perl was a job-switch; I joined a company that needed a toolsmith, and within a few weeks was using Perl constantly.  One colleague had written some useful utilities in Expect and Tcl/Tk, and I persuaded him to switch over to Perl.  It became second nature to download any modules we needed from CPAN (perl/Expect, perl/Tk, etc.), and I found myself reading all I could about Perl in my spare time.

Every job I've had since then has been primarily programming Perl!