like telling the worlds most literal person what to do after removing common sense and free will.

If that fails I loan them my netbook that has spacechem on it

Use a shampoo bottle as an example of an infinite loop:

While(true)
{
Wash();
Rinse();
}

^C
^C
^C
aborted

C:\>HeadnSho~1\

If someone is actually that interested in it...

Start off with a quick explination of hardware:
"You got the cpu that processes stuff"
"You got ram that just remember variables and stuff."
"And you got your graphics card that turns data into pixals and stuff"
(I talk about the gpu but not here yet so they don't get confused)

Then I just kinda shortly explain from there:
"I tell the cpu what to do and the cpu calculates shit with the variables in ram and the cpu sends it's stuff to the graphics card to be displayed. But, if I need 60 something frames per seconds I'll tell the gpu to help think about graphics so the cpu can think about other things."

I found this to be the best way to explain programming without giving a shitty half assed reply and without confusing the shit out them. Most people are happy to get the picture. If I can tell they don't know anything about computer hardware, I say Graphics Processing instead of gpu.

But, I think as programmers we should avoid talking about it as much as possible. I refer to it as software engineering to them just because it sounds cooler.

@Estabon I sincerely apologize if you are indeed intelligent, but you sound like an absolute idiot.