THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 12, 1995 TAG: 9511080075
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: K4 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: My Job
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
BUTCH MELSON hates the feeling that he's missing something.
So he doesn't skip church or forget his bridge dates. And he doesn't stay home sick from work. Never.
For 31 years - not counting vacations - he's turned up every single morning at his job at Bell Atlantic. Thirty-one years. That's 1,612 weeks. That's 8,060 days. Holy Cal Ripken.
Yup. Zadoke Augustus Melson Jr. likes a routine.
``I'm a creature of habit,'' he says, ``It's the only thing I do better than anybody else - show up to work.''
Not quite true, says his boss.
``He is a very modest person,'' says Steve Davidson, a supervising engineer with the phone company. ``He's quite an exceptional employee. In the technology field we're in today, he's right up at the top.''
And the guy at the top gets started every morning like this:
Melson rolls out of bed, takes two steps, turns into the bathroom and brushes his teeth. The rest is such a well-worn groove that he says he gets to work and can't remember how he got there. The trip from his home in Chesapeake's Great Bridge to the parking lot at his Portsmouth office takes half an hour. By 7 a.m. he rolls his chair up to his computer in a tidy, 8-by-8-foot cubicle.
Melson is a loop electronics engineering assistant. His computer drawings - a maze of dotted lines, dark lines and dashes - show Bell Atlantic construction crews where to lay fiber-optic phone cable and associated equipment.
Right now, he's excited about something he's working on that the company calls a ``fiber optic to the curb'' trial in Suffolk, one of only two such projects in Virginia that bring fiber optics to private residences.
Flashing the Bell Atlantic watchband he was given for 20 years of service, Melson picks up two pieces of cable lying on his desk, brandishes the fat one and launches into an explanation of loop electronics, ``binary codes'' and ``digital signals,'' Greek to anyone who doesn't know the difference between traditional copper-wire telephone lines and state-of-the-art fiber optics. Melson says, ``It's a lot like `Beam me up, Scotty.'
Simply, though, the copper wire cable, a thick chunk, is big, bulky, on its way out. Fiber-optic cables are small, light, will do more in less space and do it faster.
Sometime soon the phone company will be able to send more than just voice signals through the cables - eventually fiber optics will lead television and computer signals to the home, too.
OK. But back to that mania about coming to work every day. He thinks it started in Sunday school at Nimmo United Methodist Church in Virginia Beach when he was just a little fellow.
``I got so many attendance medals over a few years that I walked lopsided,'' he jokes.
He says the drive for perfect attendance continued in elementary school. Then, as an adult, after a 3-year hitch in the Navy when he was 21, he started working for the phone company.
``I worked a few years without missing a day and then I thought it'd be interesting to see how long I could keep it up,'' he says.
He kept it up through colds, the flu and even something more serious.
``I've passed two kidney stones. One here by the way,'' he says. ``I had the good fortune to pass the first one on my day off, if you want to call passing a stone good fortune.''
The company noted his efforts.
Behind him on the wall, opposite the coffee pot cleaning schedule, is a framed letter of appreciation from Melson's higher-ups for his steady performance. It congratulates him for 29 years of perfect attendance achieved back in 1992.
That's old news. And the fact is, his family even teases him about the way he comes to work each and every day. But Melson did keep the letter. Even seems kind of sad when he says the company doesn't send them out anymore.
But he worries that people might think he's kind of nerdy.
He's not, he says. ``To me it's just a matter of personal pride. Remember Cal Ripkin when he made all those games? You hate to break something you've got going.''
Keep going, Butch. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN, The Virginian-Pilot
``I'm a creature of habit,'' says Butch Melson, who hasn't missed a
day of work in 31 years of working for the phone company. The
Chesapeake man is a loop electronics engineering assistant with Bell
Atlantic in Portsmouth.
by CNB