The same people cannot be expected to behave differently.

 By spending years in a place where I was neither loved nor needed, I exposed the robotic flaw inside every ordinary person; the same people cannot be expected to behave differently, for once someone had lodged in their minds in a certain way they would always act in accordance with that and would not consent to a deeper interest, so they will never annul that code and become "surprising." In other words, from morning until noon for years, they consistently behaved as if I were completely invisible. They acted toward me like a piece of background decoration; they did not know that by doing so they would become mere background decoration to me, and even if they had known, they would have been indifferent—lost in the whirlpool of lives filled with hundreds of people.