Is this deliberately borrowing from Herman Melvile's "Bartleby the Scrivener"? If so it might be worth mentioning, rather than just referring to it as "my short story", since it's a nearly identical retelling of it.
“Ah humanity!” Ya, knowing this would have shaped my own reading a lot. I wonder though, if it wasn’t intentional, if the structure came from AI which would have had this in its training data. Asking one for help with outlining a story feels pretty innocuous.