Computers and mothers

Anyone that is over 40 will tremble at the combination of these two words. Computers and mothers. My mother is a lovely woman who just turned 80. I just spent an hour and twenty five minutes talking her through a download. It started out simply enough. I wrote a novel. It is in ebook form and my mother wanted to buy it. I told her I would just send it to her but no, she's my mother and she wants to buy her son's book. So, I began the journey toward navigating her to the book site. She lives in Tampa Bay, I am in Spokane. She is on a PC. I am a Mac guy all they way. My sister was nice enough to buy the laptop for her so I had not say in the matter. Why anyone would give an 80 year old woman a PC seems to be cruel and inhuman but that's just my opinion.
So, I navigate her to the Smashwords site that contains my novel. Now, she has to open an account. She fills out the form and hits enter. After several unsuccessful attempts she realizes that under COUNTRY she has listed Angola. Once this is corrected the account opens. Then I have to explain that the site wants to confirm her email before she can continue. We leave Smashwords and navigate to her email where she is amazed that an email from smashwords is waiting for her. Once we have her confirmed we are back at Smashwords to buy the book. She adds it to her cart....finally, "What's a cart? Why do they call it that?" She fills out her CC info, three times. In order to talk her through this, I have to log in under another email account so that I can step through with her on my computer. I end up having to buy my own book. Eventually, she buys the book.
Now we have to download the book.
Of the many options that we have to download I figure that a pdf will be the easiest for her to use. So, we attempt to download the pdf. On my Mac it is a fifteen second action. On her PC the question mark icon appears next to the Acrobat icon. She does not have the program. Instead of trying to explain to her how to download Acrobat I go another route. I have her download the novel as a epub file and plan on getting her an ebook reader. The e-reader is a free download at barnesandnoble.com.
Fifteen minutes later we arrive at the B&R site. "Yes mom, Noble is spelled with one b." I get her to the ebook section and to the download page for the e-reader. She then downloads the e-reader and this is where this goes horribly bad. I have no idea how to navigate the download on the PC. Where does she put it, how does it work? I am lost.
I finally find it on her desktop, which she did not know she had, and we attempt to open it. The reader takes us back to B&R where it asks her to open an account. OMG!!! I want to kill myself.
At long last I realize that I cannot find the e-reader on her computer because we have no idea where she put it and she has no idea what a hard drive is. My sister will be on a conference call with us tonight as we once again take up the battle, that I can promise you.
After I finally say goodbye to my mom, I check my Smashbook account to find that in the interim I have sold 4 more books and have had 6 new sample downloads. I am excited for a moment, then it hits me. Who wants to bet that in this process my mother bought my book 4 times?
All of this for a $2.99 book that I could have just emailed her. No wait, I take that back. We would then be back to the same issue, downloading and saving it to her computer. Computers and mothers. Is there anything more frightening?

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/12052