How one hour of repetition became a luxury service—validation laundering at the bank

A client spent almost an hour being told the exact same thing twice because she “wanted to hear it from someone else.” That sentence is a microeconomy: she wanted certainty; the bank offered information; and she preferred redundancy over cognitive risk, even at the cost of time. The result was a polite, expensive feedback loop—equal parts complaint and performance art.

Model (naïve, but useful): Suppose a customer values not just information (I was approved) but also provenance (who said it). If Trust(Person A) < TrustThreshold, then repeat until Trust(Person n) ≥ TrustThreshold. The cost to the bank is employee time; the benefit to the customer is social proof. Call this behavior “validation laundering”: you run the same fact through multiple authorities until it emerges certified and clean.

The Reddit evidence is textbook. One commenter described needing name, DOB, and procedure confirmation in a radiology office—protocol meeting performative reassurance. Another recalled locals insisting they “wanted to hear it from ‘a man’” (a gendered calibration of credibility). A supervisor-in-queue joke—“put him in queue and let him listen to himself wait”—isn’t just gallows humor; it’s the service team’s coping mechanism for ritualized re-verification. (Sidebar: putting someone on hold is a legalistic pause button that feels bureaucratically solemn.)

Policy memo, circa reality: “All client statements shall be repeatable on demand by another human; client reserves right to request additional repetitions for symbolic validation; bank reserves right to bill in coffee or patience.” In plain terms: this is inefficient, but it’s efficient for certain values of efficient—namely, peace-of-mind traded for someone else’s time. The real insight isn’t pettiness; it’s that some customers will monetize certainty, and the rest of us become the reimbursement method.