In the early 90's I often dealt with a nice older woman who was a good secretary but clueless about technology. Like the above poster, I went through a troubleshooting session where I asked her to unplug her computer because it was hung and she couldn't manage to turn it off. She asked "how do I do that?" I asked if she could unplug her toaster and when she acknowledged that she could I told her the computer was no different. However, after plugging it back in the machine was still hung. Yes, of course, she unplugged the monitor.

On another occasion she called because she lost all her files. I had her typing commands, trying to see if the directories were still there. "dir c:\", etc. She kept telling me, close to tears now, that it wasn't returning anything. The cursor was just sitting on the next line blinking. I finally got her to describe everything that was on her screen. It turns out she was in WordPerfect and so, of course, my DOS commands weren't doing anything. In the end we discovered that she had simply, accidentally, changed the default document folder. Once I guided her back to c:\docs all her files magically re-appeared.