More old style Industry. This comic strip recalls the humiliating pranks that first-day factory workers would have inflicted on them by their experienced elders. Other joke tasks included being sent to the Parts Department and instructed to ask for "a long stand". This, of course, resulted in the innocent apprentice being left to wait for at least half an hour. Once these "rites of passage" had been endured (as the smug sociologist character in the last panel comments) the new worker was accepted as another one of the lads/lasses.