"'I have plenty of friends,' she says.
'Name one.'
She looks at me.
Which I guess is sort of sweet."
The narrator devotes part of his time with Janet to convincing her to devote herself more and more to her role here at the park. He does so by convincing her that she has nothing in the outside world but this job. Because they spend all their time together, he's not necessarily wrong about her life. Nevertheless, Janet still clings to human connection, even with the narrator, while he has long since sacrificed that to his obsession with this job.
“But not to worry. Those of you who have no need to be worried should not in the least be worried. As for those of you who should be worried, it's a little late to start worrying now, you should have started months ago, when it could've done you some good, because at this point, what's decided is decided, or would have been decided, if those false rumors we are denying, the rumors about the firings which would be starting this week if they were slated to begin, were true, which we have jut told you, they aren't."
Greg downplays the severity of the firings. He has long been contemplating who to fire and is not interested in the emotional response of his employees. This is business for him. As his speech reveals, Greg knew that playing employees against each other would create a competitive environment as well as to bring out dissent. He simply fires the ones who didn't like his methods.
"It feels like we’re racing. At one point she gives me a look, like: Slow down, going so fast is inauthentic. I slow down. I slow down, monitoring my rate so that I am pretending to catch and eat small bugs at exactly the same rate at which she is pretending to catch and eat small bugs, which seems to me prudent, I mean, there is no way she could have a problem with the way I’m pretending to catch and eat small bugs if I’m doing it exactly the way she’s doing it.”
Paranoid because Greg has asked him about Janet's performance, the narrator starts measuring his own performance against hers. Perhaps she is evaluating him as well. The paranoia starts effecting the narrator's job performance, as he begins to overthink menial tasks he has performed for years. The realism which he relishes about this job is lost.
“Probably someday some guy representing me will be in there, and some punk who I'm precursor of will be hooting at me, asking why my shoes were made out of dead cows and so forth? Because in that future time, wearing dead skin on your feet, no, they won't do that. That will seem to them like barbarity”
For all his devotion to the job, the narrator demonstrates a profound distrust in humanity. He recognizes that what makes his position valuable is that it's temporary. He cannot work here forever, and, more importantly, this position may not be available forever. As a student of the past, the narrator is a firm believer that the future will quickly overtake his present.
