Last night, I was scheduled to be out the door at 9:30 pm. The way I saw it, that gave me just enough time to watch the last five minutes of the Nuggets game, which, from the looks of the box score and Eric’s morning-after analysis, was an extremely exciting game. And if you can read between the lines, you know that last sentence means I didn’t get to watch any of the game.

Why?

As we were walking out the door, one of the managers walked up to me and a couple of my co-workers and said, “I need you to help me move all this stuff.”

Let me back up about two and a half hours to 7:00 pm, when there was no one in the store. No one. Seems like a good time to be moving stuff, right? Well, that’s what we thought, too, but the first we heard of it was at 9:29 pm when we tried to walk out the door. Ultimately, it took us a half hour to move all the junk.

So, you’ve got me and a few angry co-workers leaving a half hour late and missing an exciting playoff game to do something that even someone with limited foresight could have assigned two hours before, and you know what words we never heard: “Please” and “Thank you.”

I walked away from the store angry. In the first place, it was complete BS that we were required to help with this when it wasn’t our fault that the manager responsible didn’t bother to communicate the issue to the earlier staff in the day. That we had to miss the small bit of the game that we were counting on seeing rubbed salt in the wound. And to not even get the basic courtesy of a “please” or “thank you” just added insult to injury.

I understand that there are times when I’ll be called upon to do something extra. I get it. It’s a dynamic world, and if you can’t roll with it you’ll be left behind. I can handle that, and I can handle pitching in in unexpected ways at unexpected times.

• What I can’t handle is being treated like solving the problems your poor planning created is somehow a part of my job.
• What I can’t handle is being treated like someone who didn’t have anything better to be doing.
• What I can’t handle is not even getting the slightest bit of recognition that what I did was above and beyond the call of duty and made a significant difference in your night.

If you look, you’ll find that more often than not your Generation Y employees are willing to go the extra mile if it’s needed. But if you don’t recognize that they’re doing something extra, or at the very least ask them politely for their help on some above-and-beyond task, they won’t go the extra mile for you. Instead, they’ll go down the block and get work with someone who will recognize their efforts.