I dunno, I think you have to give her points for figuring it out on her own, and not standing back and looking at you expectantly. There are alot of women who are raised as princesses, and for this they should be pitied, not censured. I mean, you can hardly blame a 14 year old girl for not getting out of the car when it is cold and miserable to help Dad put air in the tire when no one in the family has any expectation that she should do such a thing. If you are rasied to never even look at anything even vaugely mechanical and then you have to try and figure it all out as an adult, yes, it is a slow process.
Sort of like trying to intuit out long division when no one has ever bothered to do any arithmetic in front of you.
"First she spends about ten minutes reading the directions on the pump, which consist of “Press Button.”’
After I wiped the coffee off of my monitor, I realized that
I think that this person must have been my first wife. 
That woman lent a whole new meaning to the word dumb.
In a way, I have to agree with Manda JO though. However, if she had no clue as to how to operate the tire pump, one would think that she could have, oh I don’t know, asked, maybe. Things that make you go HMMMM.