I was in charge of managing a depart-level NT domain and all of the workstations in it (only about 20).

Batch files were quickly rules out as useful admin tools and vbscript wasn't even a choice to me.

However, I did discover something fancy in a resource kit: Kixtart.

It was fantastic because it was so similar to BASIC it let me use the year of BASIC I had in high school.

Even with that, it wasn't long before I hit the wall.

There were things I needed to do that Kixtart was not able to do for me.

Another tidbit in the resource kit was an old version of Active State perl.

I downloaded the newest version avaialble at the time and ordered some Win32 / Perl books.

Diving into Perl and discovering PPM and CPAN modules, I realized that there was absolutely nothing that this language could not accomplish for me.

It was euphoric.

I was hooked and I use perl on a daily basis.

I am in data security now and don't manage workstations, servers, or a domain, but perl has been extremely useful in automating long running or tedious tasks (such as scanning a network looking for systems that someone has logged on to and, if found, copying all of the files from their profile to a central repository; or running the magic 'file' program against misnamed temp files and taking action based on the file type; or even stitching together split dd file images into a single image file).

Anything any other language can do, perl can do.