YOU’VE all heard stories about the way bosses induct and ridicule new staff by giving them daft jobs to do on their first day.

Sending an apprentice to the local store to pick up a can of ‘elbow grease’ is clearly the classic wheeze.

Traditionally, new workers were packed off on a wild goose chase in which everyone apart from them was in on the joke.

Shop staff would suck in their teeth and say they were out of stock but direct them to another store, and the poor sap would spend all day before going back into the factory to rounds of laughter and cheers at their expense.

This week, I read a novel about a chap’s first day in the Welsh mines in 1911. His boss deliberately gave him a dodgy lamp which went out within minutes. The new miner was left alone underground all day in the dark with rats running up his leg as part of his induction experience.

Well, I’m not quite as cruel as that at Midweek, but I did think up something funny for Australian reporter Kieran Banks when he joined Kieran, from Queensland, pitched up on the day Marlow’s Andrew Strauss won The Ashes cricket series.

So I thought it would be a bit of a laugh – and a good article as well – to get Aussie Kieran to ring round Bucks cricket clubs and ask if they thought England’s triumph would revitalise local sport.

Kieran didn’t bat an eyelid (mind you, the Aussies in his team didn’t bat anything either) and set about calling local clubs.

I had to hold in my sides as I heard his distinctive Aussie drawl ask Bucks clubs what The Ashes win would do for local English cricket.

One surprised cricket stalwart found it hilarious that an Australian was ringing up to do this in the moment of his country’s darkest despair. “He had a good laugh about it, but sportingly congratulated me for being able to ask the questions,” said Kieran.

In the end, Kieran’s professionalism shone through and a good piece was printed in last week’s Midweek.

But he admitted: “Deep down it really hurt me to ask these questions when my fellow countrymen had been so badly humiliated by you Poms.”

Altogether now – ahhhhhh.