After leaving the Navy, Mitch returned home to live with his family. Well not exactly home, as his family had relocated from sunny California, with its beautiful year round weather to Pennsylvania, where it had actual seasons. Sure Mitch had experienced seasons to some extent during his brief military career, living through a summer with days so hot he could do nothing but drink water and a winter with lake effect snow dumping half a foot of fresh powder. But life outside the military was a return to a life of struggle Mitch did not fully see coming at the time and in a new location, which definitely did not help anything. To add on to everything else, Mitch had to unlearn what he had learned while in the service. After about a year out of the military, having explored his options, Mitch settled on going back to school. He had looked at getting a job, but with his only work history being the military and having washed out from that, many employers seemed to not be interested in hiring him. So college it was.
Having taken some computer classes in high school, Mitch enrolled in the computer degree the local college offered. He attended a week long program the college had, as a way to prepare students for college life. It was during this week that Mitch, after testing eligible to take the level of math his degree required, he learned something that set him on his lifelong path. He learned what a web page was. Now to many readers this might seem funny, but Mitch at the time was unaware there was a cyber world being built. Once introduced though, Mitch took to designing as many web sites as he could. Of course they were cheesy given the time and his very basic skills, but with some resources, he actually become quite well learned and even managed to develop for some household names. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Mitch breezed through so many of his classes, except the one dealing with programming. You see he had 3 years of programming experience from high school, but lacked the base understanding needed to be effective at writing code. He had learned one language in high school and was now being asked to write in another. Without any underlying understanding he would struggle to code in the new language, failing to grasp the core structure of writing code. Sure he eventually learned to write in a few languages which helped develop websites, but the struggle up to that point could have been avoided.
After way too many semesters in college and a few major changes, he finally settled on something he could grasp. Given some life events he would struggle through things, including the loss of his mother. Mitch’s mother, Brenda, was an anchor for Mitch. She was also the one he communicated with during his military days and part of the reason he ultimately was discharged. Mitch never blamed her for that though, after all it was he who had been discharged and blaming her would not have changed that.