Ms L wanted help with using her new tablet to video call her family.

It all started well - her son had already connected it to the internet and set her up with an email account when he visited a few weeks back so a large part of the task was complete.

On seeing Mrs L's emails, it looked like a Facebook account had also been set up, so I made an educated guess that Messenger would be the app of choice.

Then came the problems. Facebook wanted a verification code. The verification code wasn't appearing in the email account or texted to the phone number specified no matter how many times we tried.

Mrs L's son happened to call while I was trying different ways of getting the code and confirmed that it is Messenger that they would like to use and that he'd had similar problems with the verification code the week before.

As an 'IT expert', I turned everything off and on again and hey presto, a verification code was received. On entering the number, Facebook returned a screen to say that the account had been suspended a few weeks back. To reinstate it, they wanted a video selfie to verify that Mrs L was a real person. Mrs L, not being of the selfie generation, had a lot of difficulty moving like what the app deemed to be a real person whilst holding the tablet and looking at the screen to follow the instructions. No matter how many times she tried, it didn't work. Eventually I did it with my face to check that it wasn't faulty (as I am a human from the selfie generation it worked first time 🤷‍♀️). Mrs L tried a few more times with some tips from me but still with no luck. We sent my selfie video in and hoped that would be enough to convince Facebook to let her in.

Unfortunately, verification takes just over a day so there was nothing more I could do.

I showed her the Messenger app on my phone to reassure her that it really was quite simple once everything is set up, put the relevant to apps on the home screen of her tablet so they are easy to find, and wrote some basic instructions (with drawings of the app icons) before bidding her farewell.