Tales From The Top Tube: A wrencher's manifesto

I went to work today knowing I had at least two bikes to tune and felt giddy to get the day rolling. Not every day is like this at the shop where I work. Although I am a bike mechanic, some times my days are filled with writing copy, talking with customers, and taking care of the shop. The days that I get to work on customers' bikes are the days I love the most. Cleaning, adjusting, lubing, tightening, loosening, straightening. I live for these days. The days where an “impossible bike” comes in with a person who just wants it to run for a few more months. Or the woman who wants to get her husband's Peugeot restored because that is the bike he rode in grad school, twenty years ago.

Each bike tells a story of the person who owns it. Red sand caked on the crank arms means that they have been to Southern Utah recently. Salt residue means they commute in the winter. I love getting to know these bikes and the people who ride them. I occasionally see these people at a stop light, in the bike lane, or at the grocery store. Being able to ask how their bike is doing, or how their new panniers are treating them and hearing them say, “Great!”, brings joy to my day. Seeing how my work has kept them liberated from the confines of an automobile, seven days a week, is the most satisfying of all feelings.

When people ask how I found bicycling, I always tell them it really found me. It sounds cheesy to say, but it is true. I have always ridden bikes, for one reason or another, but wrenching on bikes and myself collided into each other. Being a bike mechanic doesn’t pay well but that isn’t why I have stayed with it. The joy I get from fixing a person's bike, or selling them one that they will love just as much is more satisfying to me than making six figures.

I never planned on falling in love with having greasy hands, facing tools and allen wrenches, but my life has been all the better since.

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