---
url: 'https://dri.es/my-first-paycheck'
title: 'My first paycheck'
author:
  name: 'Dries Buytaert'
  url: 'https://dri.es/about'
date: '2010-06-09T15:46:56-04:00'
license: 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/'
type: blog
published: true
featured: false
id: 1686
---

# My first paycheck

One of the fun things about [moving](https://dri.es/moving-to-boston-for-two-years) is that you get to go through a lot of your old stuff. It floods your mind and heart with memories of the past.

For example, I found this old paycheck from 1997 when I was 19 years old. I was working part-time for a Belgian internet service provider called *Planet Internet* to help support my way through college.

[image miscellaneous-2010/first-paycheck]

As you can see from the picture above, I was making 296 BEF/hour, which in today's world is 7.4 EUR/hour or 8.8 USD/hour. The best part of the job was the free flat-fee internet subscription which would otherwise have cost me 300 EUR/year (or 360 USD/year).

When I joined, Planet Internet was still a relatively small start-up, and I was part of a 5-person team that did both technical support and telemarketing. When I left a few years later, they had over 50 people in support and telemarketing alone. Ironically, more than ten years later, I have my own fast-growing start-up selling technical support through inbound sales and marketing ...

(Strictly speaking, it wasn't my first paycheck as in high school, I worked at the grill of a *Quick*, a fast food restaurant similar to McDonald.)
