What it's like to be a bike mechanic

I got asked the other day what I do for a living and I told them I do homework and go to school. But I also work as a bicycle mechanic sometimes too. So I'm going to share a little bit about what I actually do as a bike mechanic.

I started working there two summers ago, and mainly during summers. The shop opens at 10 and usually everyone gets there about 9:45 because they had just gotten back from a ride and need to shower and do whatever before we open. But I won't focus on them as much.
So most mornings, I make sure everything looks good, normal stuff. Sometimes someone will be making coffee or if the Tour de France is on, we'll be watching that. What I do besides being a mechanic is everything else and everything no one else wants to do. I've done just about everything there is to do in a bike shop environment (except clean the bathrooms, I'm not into that). Some days I'll just be stocking things for a large part of the day and talking to customers about Lance Armstrong, assuming I know what he's up to recently because they can't relate bicycles to anything else. Or some days I'll be on a lunch run on a bike, those are always fun. One of the weirdest things I've had to deal with though is during my summer working there, a woman had walked in with a bike, completely painted white and asked if I could fix it up. She looked like a student at UT and was probably the most desperate person I've ever seen in my life. It was one of those 'ghost bikes' you see on the side of the road with some flowers and a picture of the person that had died. She brought in a ghost bike. I really didn't know what to do. I stood there staring at the bike, unsure of what to tell the woman. It's pretty much like someone giving you a smelly body bag and asking if you can clean it for them. Not saying she killed the guy, but same concept.

"Do you think you can fix this? I need to get around."

On other days, I'll be changing the lightbulbs in the most hard to reach places, testing out bikes, re-arranging anything that can be re-arranged, once to the point of renovating the entire bike shop.

A lot of the time it gets boring, except for Saturdays and Sundays, those days are crazy. People will come in with bikes, wheels, children, dogs, questions, wanting to rent bikes, wanting to know what Lance Armstrong is up to these days, wanting to know if they can do this on their bike, wanting to know how much this will cost, asking if we sell bikes here, and the thing I hate most, asking if they can speak to someone else.

I usually get that a lot, almost every day I'm working there "Is there someone else I can talk to about this?" or "Wait, do you work here?" or hesitating to trust me with their bike.

Yes, I do work here and no, there is no one else you can talk to.
But it's not that bad, I've actually had someone say they prefer having me work on their bike when they bring it in, now that's cool.

I didn't touch on everything, but there's a little bit about what I do as a bike mechanic.