I never knew

I never knew I was so bad at summarizing.

I was given a 65-page English report and was told to summarize it (in Korean) within five days.
The report was..well, not something I would ever decide to read on my own.

So anyhow, I was trying my best to summarize it,
but from the beginning, I found myself translating it, pretty much word for word.
Then I realized how time-consuming it was, and decided to really 'summarize'.
What I ended up doing was to translate the titles and the first and last sentences of each paragraph (even that took a long time, because the sentences were so damn long and technical).

(Actually, that's what I used to do in college to get away with the loads of reading material to prepare for class. No wonder I don't recall learning much from reading.)

That's not summarizing!
Summrizing means I should read the whole thing, understand the gist of it, and write THAT down.

Of course I didn't want to read 65 pages, and neither did I get the gist of what the report was trying to say.
My excuse would be that the report was in the form of a manual,
and HOW DO YOU 'SUMMARIZE' A MANUAL for a TV or cell phone, for example?
MANUALS aren't meant to be summarized.
The reader is supposed to look at the 'table of contents' and read only the parts that matter to him/her. (sigh)

I failed to finish 'summarizing' the thing within the deadline, anyway.
And then the person who made me do it told me to stop meddling with it, because what the boss needs is to meet deadlines, not a high-quality report. =_=

And then right away someone else told me to summarize another report.
It was much shorter (about..20 pages?!), but I had only 2 hours to finish that one.
I couldn't finish that one on time, either.

The occurence of those two events (one after another, too!) was QUITE embarassing.
I've had 16 years of schooling including tertiary education and I can't bloody SUMMARIZE.
And on top of that, I almost never seem to satisfy my superiors these days.
(Okay, how can I when they are all perfectionists of the worst kind? And when the deadlines are always unrealistic?)

I was so worn out and miserable yesterday that I refused to look for anyone to have dinner with.

Today was pretty easy.
I only had a couple of easy, SHORT tasks and I think I did okay on both of them.
Maybe I'll call up a friend to have dinner with.