Nothing as dramatic as your story, but the reason I learned Perl back in 1999 or so was because I was a contractor for a contractor for a company that imported a CDs worth of XML into a database every week. The importer was written in Java, the import took around 3 days, and frequently broke because the XML didn't have escaped ampersands etc.

I wrote some scripts that chunked the input, sanitized it, scripted loading and reloading (basically baby's first ETL) and got it to run without failing every week.

A few months later I fat-fingered a rm -rf and lost all the scripts. There were no backups because the machine was not rated as being in production.