It's not every day your praises are sung for a job well done.

But with "Porgy and Bess" performers at the MTA's annual Medals of Excellence ceremony Friday, there was no doubt these workers had earned respect, including from the head of New York City Transit, himself a former station foreman.

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"A deliberate, exact, 100 percent juxtaposition of what normally goes on, which is catching people doing things wrong," Andy Byford said at the ceremony in lower Manhattan. "This is catching people doing things right."

Thirty-four employees of New York City Transit were recognized at headquarters for doing it right — like bus operator Christer Beckford. He took the coat off his back for a lost 2-year-old boy he spotted outside his bus on a frigid morning last winter in College Point, Queens, and then called police.
 

(Christer Beckford spotted a toddler outside his bus on a frigid morning in Queens last winter and helped save him. Vivian Lee/NY1.)

"About 15 degrees outside," Beckford said. "I was shocked because the baby was just in his socks, no jacket. Just his pajamas that he had on."

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Signal Maintainer Tony Mannino jumped onto the tracks to save a woman at Newkirk Plaza in Brooklyn last August. Train operator Larry Moreno stopped an inbound Q train just feet from Mannino and the woman, who had refused to move.
 

(Signal Maintainer Tony Mannino, who helped save a woman at Newkirk Plaza in Brooklyn last August. Vivian Lee/NY1.)

"She went in front of the train, on the tracks," Mannino said. "I knew I had to get her off the tracks because she could have hurt herself."

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Sprinting into action to help out with an emergency wasn't the only impulse recognized with an award Friday. Many awards were handed out for everyday commitment to the job: showing up day in, day out, and making a difference.

For 41 years, dispatcher and former driver Tony Ventimiglia has kept an eye on buses, the drivers, and their riders at Staten Island's Eltingville Transit Center. Lately, he noticed homeless people sleeping on benches around the lot and he contacted Project Outreach.

"Sometimes weeks on end I'd see the same people, and then all of a sudden they're gone," Ventimiglia said. "Hopefully they're placed."

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Regina Davydova was heading to her MTA internship when the man beside her on the train had a seizure, and she called for help. She now works for the MTA.

"All in a day's work!" Davydova said. "But it does feel great to be able to help somebody."

Helping somebody ties all the honorees together. Not a bad way to start off the new year.

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