My wife suffers from a similar problem to the OP, but instead of ignoring dialog boxes, she always clicks "OK" without reading any of the message (or reading the first couple of words). She ended up formatting my netbook because of it: on boot, it had a message that said something along the lines of "Hit F2 to enter system recovery mode" where it does an automated nuke/pave. There were fully 3 dialog boxes with various messages similar to "this will erase everything, you sure?" that she quickly "OKed" her way through, it doesn't even look like a normal windows boot, it's very obviously a utility running, but she doesn't see it, she just sees an "OK" box and hits it, or reads the message "Hit F2....." and follows along without reading the rest or wondering why it looks different. It was halfway through the wipe (like 10 minutes in) when she turns the screen around to me and says "this is taking a while, what is it doing?" to which I reply "AUGH WTF"
Now it has a grub boot that has the options
- Windows (defaulted)
- Linux
- FUCKING ERASE EVERYTHING
I figured her "read first words only" syndrome would notice that and jolt her out of her "ok ok ok" mode.
She's smart with other stuff, and a smart person in general. It's just computers that shut her mind down.
Her laptop had died the other day (goddamned Vista can't repair the way XP could apparently) so I put Win7 on it, and I've been installing any of the applications she needs as she asks for them. Yesterday I was busy and she was asking me about some image-editing software, all I could get out of her was "microsoft image edit something something" so I just told her to go find it, figuring it'd be easy enough to find it on MSs site, which she did, and showed me the page on ms.com that has the big "download here" button and asked if this was right, and I said "I don't know, you tell me, you're the one that knows what you used on your laptop" assuming that she was asking if it was the right software. So I look back over a few minutes later and she's on some obviously spyware-ridden webpage about to click on something and I yell "WOAH STOP!". She got sidetracked searching for this MS image editing software onto this crapware site trying to trick her into downloading something claiming to be it. I asked her "you were at the Microsoft site at the very page to download the software, what happened?" and she says "I didn't think you could download anything from microsoft" ... I just... didn't know what to say to that, I asked her "why?" and she says "isn't that pirating?" ... my mind is full of so many questions and corrections and just... wonderment at how someone gets so turned around despite obvious evidence otherwise (didn't the big "download" button clue you in, honey?), but knowing how she works, I just said "no, go back to the microsoft site, if they let you download something, then it isn't pirating, and don't visit sites like this crapware one, stick with the names you know"
Someone a few posts up was saying they treat their car like "get in, drive" and don't understand how it works, and don't want/need to. I can't function that way at all, if I don't understand something at least in a basic way I don't want to use it. I couldn't go around just being wilfully in the dark and be happy.