I was working for a company which had contracted me out to a much larger one on a "just in case" basis for a couple of months - my managers were getting money in so long as I wasn't working on any other project. That left me with a lot of time on my hands, and Perl happened to be the first shiny thing that caught my eye as something new to learn. :-)

My next job involved a lot of CGI/Perl programming. Co-incidence? Well, partially at least...