The Tech Support Gore subreddit has been around since February 2012, but it has somehow never run out of new content. According to the group’s About section, anyone who works in tech support may “cringe to the brink of passing out after a few minutes looking at this subreddit.”

From photos of laptops that have been left in the fridge overnight to devices that were set on top of hot stoves, tech support workers have apparently seen it all. This subreddit has amassed an impressive 607k members over the years, yet unfortunately,  it seems to have made no progress in preventing customers from making questionable decisions with their electronic devices. 

Calling tech support can be daunting, exhausting, embarrassing and frustrating. You might be on hold for 45 minutes before an underpaid employee simply tells you to restart your device, and then it miraculously decides to work again. But if this subreddit tells us anything about what it’s like to work for tech support, that experience is arguably more excruciating than being a customer.

People put their devices through hell, and then expect employees to magically repair them. Customers are impatient and demand quick fixes, and employees can only do so much when a laptop has been through a house fire. While I’m sure you pandas treat your devices gently, please remember that if something goes wrong, it’s not the tech support employee’s fault if they can’t bring your tablet back to life. 

Bored Panda has been following the fascinating journey of Tech Support Gore for a few years now, and lucky for us, we were previously able to get in touch with one of the group’s moderators, Coffeechipmunk. 

As an expert on all things gory when it comes to tech support, the moderator shared that some of the most popular photos in the group feature objects that look like they’re on the brink of exploding. “[It's] very dangerous, but very cool looking. They probably get so big because people post the pics and you think, 'Wow, that's just a bomb at that point,'" Coffeechipmunk shared.

While you’ll find a wide variety of posts in Tech Support Gore, the community is not the place for everything tech support related. "A lot of the content on the subreddit does rather well, except for people coming for actual tech support, they get redirected to the right subreddit,” Coffeechipmunk explained. “For actual tech support gore, though, it seems like broken screens and slightly messy wires are the current posts that don't hit too hard.”

As far as why Tech Support Gore has become so popular, Coffeechipmunk attributes the group’s success to how much fun it is. "In a time where most of the internet can be incredibly serious and most times saddening or angering, r/techsupportgore is fun because you go on it and you can laugh (and/or cringe) at the crazy posts,” the moderator previously told Bored Panda.

“Where else can you see a post like, ‘Wow, these cables really are messy’ to, ‘A lizard fried my motherboard’ back to back? I love our growing community. They're a bunch of people that just enjoy tech and to some extent, the worst of it,” Coffeechipmunk said.

When it comes to what makes working in tech support so challenging, customer expectations are likely to come in at the top of the list. According to Contact Services, 66% of customers expect an employee to engage with them immediately when they reach out to a company, and 54% expect all encounters to be personalized. There’s also a lot of pressure on employees to provide excellent service, as 76% of customers say they would rather do business with a competitor after having more than one bad experience with a company.   

According to Indeed, the average salary tech support workers earn in the United States is $21.65 an hour, with $13.39 being at the lowest end and $34.99 being the maximum they can expect to earn. But unfortunately, many of these workers say they’re not being compensated fairly for all of the work they do, as only 46% say they earn enough to keep up with the cost of living in their area.  

As you can see from the photos on this list, working in tech support can be an absolute roller coaster. One day you might be given a laptop that had a banana smashed into it, while the next day you might find yourself untangling wires for what feels like an eternity. No matter what challenges you’re met with on a daily basis, if you’re a tech support worker who needs to be reminded that you’re not alone, the Tech Support Gore community will always understand what you’re going through!

Whether you’ve worked in tech support for years or you’re glad you’ve never had to, we hope you’re enjoying these photos, pandas. Keep upvoting the pics that you find particularly shocking, and let us know in the comments below what the worst issue you’ve ever brought to tech support was. Then, if you’d like to go even deeper down the rabbit hole of tech support gore, you can find our last article featuring the same subreddit right here!