Exacerbating circumstances

The most infurating task ever to be burdened with has to be helping one's mother¹ sign up for a Skype account. I am going to broaden this to 'explain anything at all to do with technology to one's mother, who continues to blame her inability to understand the most basic concepts on the fact that she's fifty'. Incidentally, my dad has a computer science degree, so why she can't ask him I don't know. But back to my mother!

Not only is she the most painfully slow (and inaccurate) typist in history, but she barely understands how it is she is managing to aim spelling atrocities at me via my brother's MSN messenger account. I'm saving the concept of automated sign-in for another day. Frankly, she's still struggling with the basics, the internet equivalent of not being sure which hand is left and which one's right (there's a trick to that one²). Anyway, so once I've gone over the reason they ask for your email address³ and explained to her that there's no reason for me to send her her password via text message rather than msn (the Russkies will be monitoring text messages too you know!) I am rapidly losing patience, especially as I can apparently assume no base level of knowledge, despite my family having had internet access since 1997.

Anyway, I'd continue, but I just uttered the phrase "Well, you just plug it into the USB port" and I suspect this is going to take a little while to explain.

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1. Real mother, not the mother that first placed me in a boat.
2. It's "stop being retarded". I bet you thought I was going to say you can make an L with the index finger and thumb of your left hand. Common misconception - that L doesn't stand for Left. It stands for Loser, which you are if you still have to do this.
3. I'm starting to think it's a really a base-level IQ test.