The saying "it's as easy as riding a bike" could have been coined by her, considering that she didn't just ride her bike to work, she rode it for work, relaying packages and documents from office building to office building, obeying traffic laws in spite of wayward pedestrians or out-to-lunch drivers. Hazel spent eleven years as a messenger, and through that job she learned the mechanisms that made her wheels spin. She became a renegade of repair, able to fix her problems while en route, and still transport her parcels. For six years she ran her own delivery service, which she says gave her "a lot of pride in what I did."

If you think this sounds like an unpredictably fun job, you're right. "I had a temp job in an office for a week, other than that I've luckily never had a boring job." She credits getting out on her bike with providing not only a paycheck, but a sense of freedom and accomplishment. And that whole mechanic thing she learned how to do when she was a messenger? Well, Hazel decided to do it as a job, both on her own, as well as for Sweetpea Bikes. A typical day of work at the bike shop is nine hours of repair and customer service, with a sizeable chunk spent having a good time with her fellow bike-minded coworkers.

 

"When I work at Sweetpea Bikes, I get to build wheels and put nice parts on custom bikes. The only real challenges are at the bike shop. There are occasionally difficult customers, and sometimes some parts that don't want to come off bikes," Hazel says. So what makes the tough days easy to get through? "I've always loved bikes," she says assuredly.

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