Recently, I have been asked to help out in producing sanitized test data. It turned out to be a perfect opportunity to show of Perl's strengths (parsing and manipulating data). In fact, it has been so successful that the team lead of the Java developers has said that, if I was still willing to teach perl over lunch, he would make it mandatory for his team.

Whoa. Any time a lead says they're gonna make team attendance at some event mandatory, I worry a little. Better would be for you to offer a 20 minute seminar on how you did what you did using Perl, to give them a taste of what the language can do. Doing it over lunch is fine, but I would suggest persuasion would work better.

And at the end of your talk, ask if any of them want to outline how the same thing might have been done in Java. ;)