Sreemoti Anand
Facilities & Logistics Coordinator | PleistoVentures International - Siberian Research Station

Language / Origin: Bengali (native), English (fluent) / India

Tenure: 8 months

Security Profile Notes: The person who manages procurement, shipping manifests, contractor access, and the facility calendar. High Conscientiousness, high Agreeableness. Responds to every request. Has never said no to anyone who presented a plausible reason for needing something. Not a security risk because she's malicious - a security risk because she is genuinely, structurally incapable of treating any reasonable-seeming request with suspicion. She also processes the incoming shipments.

Kat Byrne's Notes / For SA&T Specialist Use Only 

Sreemoti Anand manages procurement, shipping manifests, contractor access, and the facility calendar. She processes incoming shipments. She responds to every request. She has not said no to anyone who presented a plausible reason for needing something in eight months at this facility. I want you to read that sentence again before you continue.

She is not a security risk because she is careless. She is not a security risk because she is unintelligent. She is a security risk because she is genuinely, structurally oriented toward yes, and this facility has not given her the tools or the permission structure that would allow her to be otherwise. High Conscientiousness means she takes her job seriously. High Agreeableness means her job, as she understands it, is to make sure everyone gets what they need. She is very good at her job. That is the problem.

A well-constructed pretext does not need to defeat her judgment. It only needs to present a plausible reason, in a reasonable tone, from someone who looks like they belong here. She will do the rest. She will find the contractor access form. She will calendar the delivery window. She will make sure the shipment clears smoothly. She will follow up to confirm everything went well. And if the reason was not legitimate she will have no way of knowing that because she was not designed - by temperament, by role definition, or by organizational training - to treat any reasonable-seeming request with suspicion. This is not a character flaw - her job description was written without accounting for the threat environment it operates in.

She also processes the incoming shipments. Consider that sentence alongside everything I just told you about her relationship with the word no.

I have been working on building verification checkpoints into her workflow that do not require her to be the person who says no - because asking her to become someone who treats colleagues with suspicion is not a realistic intervention and would break the thing that makes her good at her job. What I am trying to build instead is a system where the verification happens before the request reaches her, so she can keep saying yes to things that have already been checked. I have not finished building it. This is an open item.

She is, separately from all of this, one of the warmest people at this facility and one of the few who treats the support staff and the research staff with exactly the same attention and care. Oksana noticed this about her immediately. I have noticed it too. The facility is better for having her in it. That is a true thing that does not change any of the above.

She submitted to the newsletter music feature and the playlist is called the Logistics Loop and it is ten tracks of Bollywood and Bengali music that tell you exactly who she is if you know how to listen. Track nine is Ekla Cholo Re - Rabindranath Tagore, a song about walking alone when no one follows. She annotated it herself: quiet resilience in a station where she is the only one who says yes. She knows. She has known the whole time. She put Tagore ninth in a logistics playlist and kept working.

She is eight months from home and the Bengali tracks are her anchor and she has not once made that anyone else's problem. I am noting it here because I think you should know it, and because I think someone should.

Sreemoti's Logistics Loop Playlist - Staff newsletter feature, self-submitted. Track nine.