This is why I am so against people using digital photography as their first and primary means. When one of my friends picked up photography with her DigiRebel, I did everything I could to get to her to understand what she's doing... Even offering her all my supplies in the darkroom and I'd teach her how to use it.
Sadly, she never took me up on the offer. When we go together to shoot at the racetrack, she frets over why her camera decides to make the track white (it's a new polytrack). I developed my slides that night and got perfect images.
When she frets about her camera not making the right decisions, I advise her on manually exposing a stop or two less. When she responds she's too lazy, I lay my face in my hands and weep.