I was a windows user for many years, but interested in Linux and wanted to do more with it.

Got the opportunity a few years ago and started working at an ISP supporting windows and linux servers as part of their NOC team before moving up to Sysadmin initially as a junior, but very shortly thereafter as a full one having developed my linux skills and shown aptitude

When I joined sysadmin I came across these lovely old hacked-together solutions. Stuff that is (was?) ingenious, and perfect at the time it was created, but by now utterly bizarre and could be done so much easier and with less chance of catastrophic failure.
A fair bit of my role revolved around keeping these old systems working whilst a fancy new one was built from scratch (long and complex process), and I kept coming across these perl scripts. I'd done VBA programming at school, and knew Spectrum BASIC, but that was it. Perl is fairly logical though, and even though the scripts were rarely commented I could generally understand what they were doing (I'd usually run the regexp past more experienced guys in my team for a quick answer), and occasionally tweak them to fix problems.
I could see that perl was effective, powerful and something I could leverage to make my life easier, and frankly I'm a lazy sod with a phobia of repetitive work. If I could spend 30 minutes doing some bash scripting to save myself 15 minutes of repetitive work I'd do it, because sod's law says I'd have to do the repetitive work again at least a few more times.
I had a week of unused holiday and the end of leave year was coming up, so I decided "Sod it", bought the Llama book, booked the week off work and ploughed through it, setting myself a target of xx chapters a day.
Then came the biggest hook. After 3 days my brain felt a little stuffed and I was getting bored with the exercises in the book, but felt I had a pretty good graps of the subject.
I'd been dealing with spammers on a regular basis and knew I was looking for certain stuff in the exim4 log that exipick couldn't tell me, and the final two days of the working week were spent writing a perl script to do the hard work for me and e-mail me the results. Shoved it in cron and knew I was in love from the first e-mail :)

That cron'd script meant a month or so later on I was able to use the time saved to set about identifying the real cause, which I did successfully and meant my first, self-written and dearly beloved script was very obsolete. *wipes a tear from eye*