After re-reading last week’s column in print, I realized that I probably misdirected my pitch for people to find their passion to the readers of this publication.

From readership surveys I know you are a driven group of people. You’ve got to be in order to be in business. If you can’t find your passion in business, you’ll fail - and fast.

So as I thought about it, it’s not you, Mr. business manager, or you, Ms. business owner, that needs to find passion in your work. It’s your employees who need to find their passion.

On my way to work one morning last week I heard a radio commercial for a local pizza place. The place likes to play off tough-guy movie soundtracks for its commercials. This particular commercial used lines from the 1970 film "Five Easy Pieces." If you remember the movie there’s a scene where Jack Nicholson’s character is trying to order breakfast. He wants a side order of wheat toast. But the waitress says they don’t have wheat toast.

"You make sandwiches, don’t you?" asks Nicholson’s character. "You’ve got bread and a toaster?"

So he orders a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce.

"Now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven’t broken any rules," says Nicholson.

We won’t go into the punchline in the movie, but on the pizza restaurant’s radio commercial, it ends with some line about dealing with difficult customers.

That’s the take away line you want to advertise to potential customers? That you have employees who can’t figure out how to get wheat toast to a customer. And that’s supposed to be a difficult customer? I get it. It’s supposed to be a joke and the pizza place doesn’t really have wheat toast. So what’s the point of the commercial?

In a similar vein, one of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with the satellite company DirecTV is the customer service. I know, I know. J.D. Power and Associates has surveys saying they’re the best. Yeah, right. All that tells me is that I can’t believe the results of a J.D. Power survey.

After being without DirecTV service for more than a week this month, I tried calling them. It’s a lengthy process as they have a system that attempts to explain how you might be able to fix it without having to talk to them. DirecTV goes out often enough, I know the drill. As near as I can tell, there’s no way around the phone message.

So I e-mailed them. They e-mailed me back with a phone number and a code. I called them but it was five days after they sent me the e-mail so the code didn’t work anymore. I sent them another e-mail and they said they would call me. They did, last Monday during the day while I was at work, and left a message saying my service would be canceled "as I had requested."

Is that what we call great customer service? And does a pizza restaurant really want to brag that it hires people who are incapable of figuring out a way to make toast?

Is business contributing to the dumbing down of America? Does anybody empower employees anymore?

E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Contact David Hatfield at dhatfield@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4237.