Interesting scenario to think about, you are station staff in a mess room near the end of your shift. You hear shouting from one platform so you investigate. You see that all your colleagues are already talking to the person, but at the same time, a passenger distracts you telling you that there is a knife on another platform under a bench which you categorise as a sharp object, but you remember how you are trained in dealing with sharp objects (not to touch it with anything other than litter pickers) and the law. You had 2 options:
Option 1:
Investigate the sharp, take the equipment over (litter picker and sharp box) and another member of staff in case it gets ugly, make an assessment on the sharp and decide because its under 3in and nothing is suspicious about it, no one talks to you about it on the platform, so you put it in the box (which it fits in) and think no more.
Option 2:
Don’t take the equipment, borrows someone else’s radio (which is probably clogged with radio traffic because of another incident and you are told off too many times for ‘overusing the radio’), call for the supervisor to meet you on the platform its on while using 2 members of staff to some how seal off this area and await for them to arrive and make an assessment.
Option 3:
It ain’t your problem, so direct the customer complaint to the member of staff that has a radio and a way of communicating.
I ask this, because its happened to me recently. Now what is interesting is that option 1 is what 2 people I specifically asked would of done, but I got told off because I didn’t do option 2, this is where I am ultimately confused. You got 2 emergency incidents at the same time, with 2 different outcomes (option 2 has a greater risk of being stabbed in my humble opinion, depending how long it takes for staff to deal with the other incident.), so 6 of one, half a dozen of the other? On the other hand, I’m thinking in future, option 3 because quite simply, what else would they want you to do? You got told off for it, you can use that as your defence and if anything goes wrong and there is an investigation, you can say “This is my report from the previous incident, I got told off for it and it upset me quite a bit, so I felt that taking my own initiative to deal with an item like this wasn’t required so I gave it to someone else to deal with for that reason and more importantly, to protect myself from these sorts of backlashes.” By that time, the supervisors are always moaning they got too much work to do anyway.