# The Supervisor Whisperer: A Case Study in Paying Twice for the Same Information

Here is a neat model: A client receives information from Employee A. The client does not believe Employee A. The client demands Employee B (specifically: a supervisor, a man, anyone with a perceived upgrade in epistemic authority). Employee B, bound by protocol and professional courtesy, repeats the exact same information. The client believes it. Everyone is sad. This is what we call “the supervisor tax,” and it is remarkably efficient at converting time into the illusion of progress.

The Reddit thread documents this phenomenon with the tenderness of a wildlife photographer. A bank employee spent nearly an hour walking a skeptical customer through withdrawal limits, ATM procedures, account details—the whole tedious inventory of her own account’s constraints. The customer remained unconvinced. So the employee, displaying the kind of malicious compliance that only service workers truly understand, simply… got a supervisor. The supervisor said the same things. The customer, apparently satisfied that the information had now been laundered through a higher authority, left happy. [The model predicts this outcome with 100% accuracy, which should trouble us both.]

What’s remarkable is how often this pattern repeats across the comments. A medical scheduler confirms patient details; the patient calls back demanding to hear it from someone else. A government employee explains a policy to a skeptical local; the local insists on “a man” to validate the same policy. A bank dispute specialist takes a regular call; the caller demands a supervisor; the specialist, who is a supervisor, simply… transfers the call back to herself under a different hat. It’s bureaucratic judo—the customer’s own distrust becomes the instrument of their own time-wasting.

Here is what the model misses: these customers are not irrational. They are engaging in a perfectly rational transaction, just not the one they think. They are not buying information—they already have it. They are buying reassurance that the information is real, and they’ve correctly intuited that reassurance is more expensive when it comes from someone with a title. They are paying in time and mild humiliation for the privilege of being taken seriously by someone with perceived authority. The bank, the hospital, the government office—they all understand this tax implicitly and simply collect it. The customer gets to believe the information only after it’s been blessed by someone “more knowledgeable,” which is to say, someone whose job title makes the information feel less like an opinion and more like a fact.

The beautiful part, the part that almost makes you tender toward the whole mess: everyone involved knows this is happening, and nobody stops it. The employee could say, “Ma’am, I already told you this.” The supervisor could say, “I’m just going to repeat what my colleague said.” The customer could say, “I don’t actually distrust the information, I distrust that a non-supervisor would know it.” But instead they all play their parts, and the customer leaves feeling like they’ve won something, which—in a certain light, for certain values of “won”—they have.