Success - A Duckumentary Drama!!!

The following in based upon real events which occured on 19th June, 2005. The ducks used to portray them are fictitious, and are used only to protect the identities of the actual participants.

Cuffy the Duck was a 2nd year Mathematics student, who had foolishly opted to sit three physics exams that year, although he fared traditionally poorly in them.

On the morning of his second physics exam, Cuffy was particuarly disillusioned. He had learnt very little of the syllabus for 'Information Theory and Noice', and did not know any of the thereoms, nor any equations but the very simple ones. True, he genuinely enjoyed the Information-theory aspect of the module, and knew all about entropy and efficiency, but he did not know anything about the Noise aspects. He had struggled to find questions on the past papers that he was able to do.

That morning, Cuffy was extremely tired. He had struggled to get to sleep the previous evening. He was also hungry, and did not have time for breakfast. He stumbled into university, without duck-shaving (so that he was all feathery). It was raining, and there was no ice in Rococo, so no Frescato for this duck.

Cuffy bought himself a rice-krispie square and a bottle of melon iced tea. He ate the square, but it didn't satisfy his hunger. Nonetheless, he was running late, and had to make haste, without eating any more, to get into the exam room on time.

When he sat down, the invigilator read out several corrections which needed to be made to the exam paper. Try as he might, he couldn't locate the sentences which were being described, and so he couldn't correct them. What is more, he did not even have time to fill in the details on the front of his awnser paper, before the exam commenced.

Things had been going pretty badly. Here, cuffy describes his state at the time;

I was in a terrible state. Physics exams are always awful, but I had never felt this bad. It seemed like every force in the universe was against me. I was dreading reading the questions, knowing how unprepared I was.

And how did you find the questions?

They were amazing! I started with question 1, without even looking at the rest of the paper, because I knew I could do the majority of it. Well! 'The majority' is an understatement! It was a walkover!

The first six marks for definitions of terms such as P(X=x(i)). Yes, as in probability! I thought, 'well, that's 6 easy marks. But I still havn't passed the paper.

The next six marks were for giving and explaining the formula for continuous entropy. I didn't know this for sure, and I know I lost quite a few marks, but I know I got at least 1 mark for this part.

The last 13 marks were all for calculating entropies, redundancies, and such things. I definately got all 13 of these.

That's 20 marks in the bag! I had already passed the paper. Of course, I knew the likelihood would be that the other two questions concerned lots of physics, and being the stuff that I hadn't learnt.

Not so! I turned the page, and question 2 was similarly awesome. The first 17 marks were for showing results in elementary statistics. I'm sorry to say that I screwed up one part of this question, so I dropped 3 of those marks. Nonetheless, I definately got 10 of the 17 marks.

The next 2 marks were for another pathetically simple probability result.

I didn't get the final 6 marks, although I may have picked up a few method marks.

I think I got 32-35 marks. That's 64%-70%, which is pretty amazing considering it was a physics exam.

It just goes to show that, no matter how grim your chances look, you should never give up. The brightest roses take root in the smelliest compost.

Following his examination, part of him wanted to stick around, but knowing that he shouldn't be spending his limited funds, he decided instead to go home. On the way to the Bus-stop, he bumped into his attractive friend, Miss. MacDuck, who had also sat an exam. She was glad to hear of his success. She also pointed out that, since he had an exam the following morning, he shouldn't go out to DV8 that night. Cuffy was wise to this logic, and had no intention of doing such a thing.

Upon arriving home, Cuffy ate lunch, and then he began playing a game upon a local website. This website awarded ranks to the players of its' games, according to how successful they were. Cuffy had never ranked #1, due to the brute success of his rival, a saucy Russian duck. However, his luck was about to change.

As if to prove that good things come in bundles of more than one, Cuffy proceeded to beat the highscore on the 'Airfux' game, giving him 6 extra points, and which made him #1 on the site!

Cuffy was so pleased with his performance that day, that he wrote an entry in his blog, describing the antics of a small dog. The characters' circumstances cleverly mirrored Cuffy's own. He entitled the blog entry 'A Dogumentary Drama!!!'

We can all learn a great lesson from Cuffy's inspirational story. It is like a great man once said,
No matter how grim your chances look, you should never give up.

He then went on to deliver an awful metaphor about roses.


This Duckumentary was bought to you by McAuley-Beasley Inc. Television

All characters presented in this dockumentary are fictitious, in that they weren't real ducks. Any resemblance to any real ducks, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.