Probably too late now, but I would suggest getting him a (free) account at a service like dyndns.org and having the system update it on dialup connection. Then when he calls and says "help" you just need to say "dial in and i'll connect in 5 minutes" - no need for him to have to figure out how to find his ip address etc so that you know where to connect to. all you need to do then is:
ssh westcoastguy.dyndns.org
You can also set up the (remote) machine to auto-reply to an email. When the auto-reply comes back, you can see the target IP address in the header.
I still prefer the dyndns.org idea. I love some of their alternative domain names. I see that douglas.is-a-geek.org is still available!
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