She Wanted To Hear "No" Twice — And the Bank Obliged

There is a small, exacting human bargain at the center of this Reddit story: facts are cheap, voices are expensive. A rude client spent almost an hour having the same piece of information read to her by different people until she felt satisfied—because hearing it once from one employee wasn’t the same as hearing it twice from two employees.

Model (toy): Suppose a person wants reassurance R, the factual content F is already available, and the only currency left is authority A. If A is low, the quickest way to raise it is a repeat performance from an apparently independent narrator. Call this the Authority‑Echo: more voices ≈ more believable, even when the voices are echoing the same script. (Parenthetical legal definition: “proof‑by‑repeat” — the cognitive fallacy that repetition by non‑independent agents confers independence.)

The comments file this away as a genre. One scheduler insists on confirming name/DOB every time because the stakes are medical; one clerk reports locals who insist on hearing it from “a man” before it counts; another put a customer in a supervisor queue and then left to get fries while the poor gentleman enjoyed the full audio re‑audit. These are different incentives—safety, status, ritual—and they produce identical theater: human beings paying in time for a psychological receipt.

Policy memo from the universe: if a customer asks for a second narrator, you may supply one; let them have their rehearsal for the truth. It’s inefficient in minutes, but efficient in a currency economics rarely prices—certainty. For certain values of “efficient,” that hour was money well spent.