The Marchon Family - Marcel Marchon

The Story Of My Life

Well, as you've seen above, I was born on July 13th, 1972 in the town of Solothurn in Switzerland. Solothurn is located roughly between Bern, Biel, Olten and Basel, at the foot of the Jura mountains. There are about 15'000 people living in Solothurn.

Actually, we used to live in Lüsslingen, a small village about 5 kms from Solothurn, until I was six. So I went to kindergarten in Lüsslingen first.

After we had moved to Solothurn in 1978, I went to kindergarten there, and one year later, I started attending primary school. Four years later, I had to move to a different school. In fifth grade, I passed the entrance exam for gymnasium, which is a sort of higher level school, as preparation for university.

I went to gymnasium for almost eight years in Solothurn. It was quite fun. At the beginning, there were some 22 people in my class, but at the end, there were only 12 left. When I was 19, I passed the final exam of gymnasium and was declared fit for university. Before that, I had to do my military service in the Swiss Army, though. This took some 34 weeks, from February 1992 to November 1992.

As I really didn't want to go to school right again, after 13 years of school and 34 weeks of military service, I decided to take a year off and start my studies in 1993. In that year I really didn't do a great deal of things: Basically, I was just enjoying life, doing some work from time to time to get some money, visiting places, etc.

In the fall of 1993, I finally started studying Economics and Business Administration at the University of St. Gallen. Unfortunately, my motivation to study for the second "prediploma" (an exam people have to pass after the first two years) proved to be too low to actually pass the exam ... So in fall 1996, I set out in the footsteps of Bill Gates and left university without a degree (sounds much nicer than to say 'I dropped out', don't you think?)

In spring 1994, I started working for the Institute for Information Management at the University. At first, my job was to develop Lotus Notes applications (well, now it should be called "IBM Notes" ...). In winter 1994/95, our focus shifted from Lotus Notes to the World Wide Web - when we (actually Hans Meli, my boss here) started up a small business of our own (Delta Consulting Group) which participated in the Electronic Mall Bodensee project (it's now called emb.net). We still do Lotus Notes stuff, but most of our work is now dedicated to creating web sites for other businesses and companies. After leaving university in the fall of 1996, I became a full time staff member of that company.

During the year of 1995, I did also work for the Students' Association, where I was responsible for all computer-related matters (sort of ...) which also included being the Webmaster of their server.

While working for delta Consulting Group AG, later namics ag (after the takeover/merger with PubliGroupe/MMD), I got to do a lot of interesting stuff with all those new technologies that came up during that time (and some older technologies that the new ones are based on ...), including but not limited to Windows NT, Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, HTML, ASP, VBScript, JavaScript, LotusScript, Java, Visual Basic, XML, Servlets, etc.

In October 2000, I started my new job at atraxis, where I was working as a Web Developer, programming mostly in Java. In the 4th quarter of 2001, SwissairGroup (the holding company atraxis was part of) collapsed and atraxis' operations were sold to EDS. Also in the fall of 2001, we moved to Bülach. On September 9th, our daughter Alexandra was born. That's when I thought "well, I guess now we're just going to be a family for a while and take it a little easy", but then all of a sudden, in the summer of 2003, I got an offer from Travelzoo to go and work for them in the United States... Now, this has always been kind of a dream for me and this opportunity was too good to pass, so we decided to pack our stuff and spend a few years in California ...

I have a brother, who's called Raphael. He's two years younger than me. My parents are called Moritz and Ruth.

Well, I guess that's it. Not really extraordinary, but hey...! If you've got any questions, please feel free to send me an email at any time.
 

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