Driver Circles Parking Lot To Avoid Forty-Second Walk

NAPERVILLE, IL — Local regional insurance claims adjuster Todd Wenzelbacher, 46, successfully added a full ten seconds to his pre-workout cardiovascular regimen Tuesday evening by circling a suburban gym’s parking lot for 19 minutes rather than walking past a landscaping island from the back row.

Entering the lot in a silver minivan at 5:42 p.m., Wenzelbacher immediately bypassed dozens of open spaces to commence a high-vigilance crawl of the front row with his turn signal illuminated.

“He did the front row four times,” recalled Marisol Funderbeck, 38, the gym’s front desk manager, who monitored the expedition from the lobby window. “By the third lap, he was slowing down next to anybody holding car keys. A man checking his phone got followed for a while.”

At 5:51 p.m., Wenzelbacher locked onto a high-value target: a woman loading groceries into her trunk by the front door. Maintaining his blinker, he waited patiently while she walked her cart to the return, strolled back past her vehicle, and entered the facility for an evening spin class.

“I saw him the whole time,” said Denise Kropotnik, 51, a dental office manager. “I assumed he was lost.”

The strategic stakeout ultimately failed at 5:58 p.m. when an adjacent vehicle pulled out of the prime spot, only to be seized by a blue hatchback that had entered the lot a mere ten seconds earlier.

Wenzelbacher finally parked at 6:01 p.m. in the far reaches of the lot, adjacent to a decorative landscaping island and a shopping cart featuring a permanently locked front wheel. The subsequent trek to the front doors required 50 seconds—roughly ten seconds longer than the walk he had spent nearly a third of an hour avoiding.

Wenzelbacher then hopped onto a treadmill to walk an intense 3.1 miles.