Dealing with inexperienced users

I stayed late in Seattle last night fixing and replacing a firewall. I'm not a big Sonicwall fan. They have a high failure rate with my customers, but sometimes you get stuck with them because they already have a lot of them before I start assisting them. I got it all fixed up around 9 PM.
The next morning I get a panicked call that no one is working. I think maybe I now have three bad Sonicwalls, as the first two went down on me in the past few month. But it turned out to be very different from that. I remotely logged into the firewall and saw everything still up and running, so I called them back and asked them to tell me the issue. The first lady said "the computer has a strange message. It says the screen is locked". It turns out that they never do that. They only log off or shut their computers off so that was a new screen for them (despite having used computers for so many years they couldn't remember their first one).
I told her to hit ctl-alt-del and type in her password. It worked and she was happily working away.
The next computer user said that her computer was on but the screen was off, and she wanted to know what I had done to her computer. Apparantly her computer never went to sleep before, so I told to press any key.
After doing so the monitor came on and everything was working.
How can people not know the basic functions of their computers? Well it's like this. Non technical people only do the bare minimum on the computer to do their job. If anything deviates from that they get extremely stressed. Some to the point of being in tears and losing sleep.
If you are new to IT then you will learn this as well. They aren't stupid. They're just complacent.