Editor’s note: We are pleased to introduce Dennis Culpepper, who joins The Windy City Dispatch today as a general assignment reporter.

What a first day. What a city. Your newest correspondent at The Windy City Dispatch is proud to report on a phenomenon that every Chicagoan knows in their bones but has never had the data to prove: revolving doors are stealing your time, and they are not sorry about it.

A new study from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has determined that the average Loop office worker loses approximately eleven minutes per business day to what researchers are calling “revolving door hesitation” — the cumulative time spent pausing, timing, false-starting, and awkwardly shuffling into revolving door compartments across the central business district.

“We tracked 1,200 subjects across forty-three buildings over a six-week period,” said Dr. Alan Mirza, who led the study. “The median hesitation per door encounter was 4.7 seconds, but the distribution has a significant right tail. Some people stand there for up to thirty seconds. One subject circled a revolving door three times without entering and then used the side door.”

The study categorizes revolving door users into four behavioral types: “Chargers” (8% of subjects), who enter without breaking stride; “Timers” (41%), who pause to calculate the optimal entry window; “Followers” (33%), who wait for someone else to go first and then draft behind them; and “Abandoners” (18%), who approach the revolving door, lose confidence, and use a regular door instead.

This reporter, on his very first day walking into the Dispatch offices, would like to confess that he is firmly in the Follower category. The revolving door in our building’s lobby is, if this reporter may editorialize briefly, intimidating. It moves at a pace that suggests it was calibrated for someone with longer legs and more conviction.

The economic implications are staggering. Dr. Mirza estimates that across the Loop’s roughly 180,000 daily office workers, revolving door hesitation accounts for a collective 33,000 lost person-hours per day — or, as the study puts it, “the productive equivalent of a mid-size company doing absolutely nothing.”

Building managers contacted for this story were largely unsympathetic. “The doors move at two RPM. That’s the slowest setting,” said Frank Cavallo, facilities director for a Wacker Drive office tower. “If people can’t handle two RPM, that’s a personal problem. I’m not slowing them down to one. That would be like not moving.”

The study recommends that employers consider offering “revolving door orientation” as part of new-hire onboarding, a suggestion that Dr. Mirza concedes “sounds ridiculous but would genuinely save money.” He added that the data also shows a sharp improvement in door confidence after the first three months of employment, which he attributes to “a combination of muscle memory and the gradual death of self-consciousness.”

This reporter is grateful for the opportunity to bring this story to the readers of The Windy City Dispatch on what is — and I cannot stress this enough — the best first day of any job, in any city, in the history of employment. Dennis Culpepper, reporting from the lobby. I made it through the revolving door on the second try.