Dries Buytaert

One of the fun things about moving 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.

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.)