IF there was one man who epitomised the American "can do" attitude it was sharp-suited, permanently tanned Victor Kiam, who nonchalantly told us in the 1980s that "I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company".

It was the Remington shaver he was referring to, and it didn't matter that early models were akin to buffing your chin with sandpaper, Victor sold the idea of electric razors, and also the idea that you could be master of your own destiny. Mind you, it helped that Victor was a millionaire to begin with, which made buying Remington a manageable financial mountain to climb.

There was a Scottish echo of Victor last week at the Scottish Modern Apprenticeship Awards in Glasgow, when Kirkintilloch coffee-shop owner Helen Jenkins won an Employer of the Year Award for putting her staff on apprenticeships, ensuring they learn all they can about health, safety, hygiene and dealing with customers. Helen's "I liked the coffee-shop so much I bought the company" moment was really thrust on her a year ago when the previous owner of the baker's and coffee-shop on Cowgate went bust, making Helen, herself an apprentice, redundant. She looked for other jobs, didn't find one, so with modest redundancy money, savings, and loans, reopened the coffee-shop, renamed it Majella's - her middle name - and rehired her five fellow staff.

"I was terrified," says Helen, who realises that running your own company is not as simple as the suave Victor led us to believe. But the groundwork she learned as an apprentice helped her deal with all the legislation that selling food can throw at you. Her staff followed her example in working through apprenticeships, and gaining qualifications. "My staff are rightly proud they are trained and the way they have worked at completing their apprenticeships has shown their commitment," she said.

The Scottish Government, through its agency Skills Development Scotland, has a target of 25,000 new apprenticeships annually, which is a hard task. But to show their importance, the think-tank the IPPR, this week claimed thousands of teenagers are studying "dead-end" courses at colleges that will probably not lead to jobs, and they would be far better off in apprenticeships.

Of course we all know the tales of apprentices being targeted for practical jokes - such as being sent for tartan paint or a long stand. Herald reader Mary McNeill once told of being an office girl with a Glasgow law-firm. "On my first day I was sent to another legal firm to collect a key to wind up an estate," she recalled.

There was the new apprentice at a Glasgow garage who had been warned by his father to watch out for the mechanics playing jokes on him. His first week was going well until the foreman shouted over for a monkey wrench. The lad thought about this before replying: "Do you think I'm stupid? There's no such thing."

The classic tale - it comes from the Glasgow shipyards where many a story is classic - of the apprentice at Fairfield's being challenged by his journeyman to take part in the annual race between journeymen and the apprentices, from Govan Cross to Shieldhall.

Knowing how fit the apprentices were, he asked what the catch was, but was told there was no catch - all the journeymen wanted was three yards of a start. It was a while before the penny dropped that the three yards they had in mind were Harland & Wolff, Fairfields and Alexander Stephen's.

Which reminds us of the gas serviceman giving a boiler a winter service in West Lothian. The older fellow was joking with his apprentice that, despite the age gap he was still fitter than the youngster. To settle it, he challenged the apprentice to see who could run back to their van faster. When they did so they were surprised to see the householder running after them. When they asked him why, he said: "When I see two gas men running as hard as you two were, I thought I'd better run, too."

However, the horror stories of humiliation such as tarring and feathering young apprentices are a thing of the past, says Jurgens Joubert, a butcher's apprentice in Shetland, originally from South Africa, who was last week named Scotland's Modern Apprentice of the Year.

He works with Whiteness butcher J and K Anderson, and his specialist meat and poultry skills apprenticeship included everything from meat preparation to packaging, and stock control to customer liaison. He has even had the time to introduce biltong, the South African style of cured meat, to the Shetland islanders.

"We do have a laugh at work," he says. "A bit of banter is a good thing - but not the humiliation that people tell you happened to apprentices before."

His apprenticeship consisted of modules he worked through at his own pace over two years with a professional butcher being sent to Shetland to assess him. As his boss Stuart Eunson says: "It was where I started in the business, and it is a very good way to get into the industry and progress from there,"

In journalism we don't have apprentices as such, but one trainee at another newspaper was keen to join the union and attend his first chapel meeting - they are called chapels after the early printers being monks. In an inspired moment a senior journalist told him he had to recite, from memory, a chapter from the Bible at his first chapel meeting - which he did to the stunned silence of his colleagues.

So, as apprenticeships become fashionable again, let's hope having a laugh at apprentices never goes out of fashion either.