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08.08.2026

# Hell Runs on Windows ME: My New Novel, Papierstau

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![Cover of Papierstau: Level 1 Drucker-Dämon](https://sharp-gaunt-garden.wraxx.site/images/papierstau-cover.jpg)

My new novel is out. It's called *Papierstau: Level 1 Drucker-Dämon*, it's in German again, and the premise is this: printers come from hell. Not as a metaphor. As an org chart.

For anyone who doesn't read German: *Papierstau* means paper jam, and *Drucker-Dämon* means printer demon. That is, quite literally, the job description. Paper jams were his work before he died, and they are his work afterwards. The only thing that changes is which side he is on.

Tom Schreiber has done twelve years of IT support. He dies on a Tuesday, halfway through his forty-seventh printer ticket of the day, and wakes up in a waiting room with orange plastic chairs and a ticket machine that skips every third number. The receptionist is a demon who looks like Mr. Bean and is very tired of people pointing that out. Then Lucifer personally assigns Tom to the printer department, as a joke, and the joke sticks.

Hell, in this book, is not fire and brimstone. It's an administration. There are corridors with no windows, signposts that contradict each other on purpose, and mandatory meetings that achieve nothing. Everything runs on Windows ME, which internally stands for Millennium of Eternal Suffering. There's a ticket for a Vista upgrade that was opened in 2001. It's still open. Priority: normal.

The joke I kept coming back to while writing is that Tom is good at this. Twelve years of support means he knows exactly which firmware version has the memory leak, and how to set a colour profile just orange enough that nobody can prove anything. He was hired to make printers fail. He turns out to be alarmingly talented at it. And in an institution whose entire structure depends on nothing ever working properly, being competent is the most dangerous thing you can be.

He doesn't do it alone. There's a hellhound with a USB-C tail who used to be a tech billionaire, can't speak, and gets translated by Tom in what starts as startup pitch language and slowly turns into something more honest. There's a department head who counts paper jams and writes the number on a whiteboard every morning. There's a CFO who only ever argues in balance sheets, and an HR demon everyone in hell is afraid of, including Lucifer.

Between the chapters there are short interludes made of documents from hell: internal emails, a Demonbook thread, an HR memo, the actual Vista ticket in full. Those were the most fun to write.

Some basics. It's about 420 pages in print. The ebook is out now on Kindle, including Kindle Unlimited: [Papierstau: Level 1 Drucker-Dämon](https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0HDDTBQJG).

A paperback and a hardcover are in review at Amazon right now and should follow shortly. The hardcover is the collector's version: it includes an appendix with the complete files of hell, the personnel records, the location register and the worldbuilding, with eighteen illustrations. It's the same story, with the paperwork attached, which felt like the right thing to do for a book about bureaucracy.

This is book two, and I still don't have much of a readership. If you read German, or know someone who likes office humour and fantasy in roughly equal measure, I'd appreciate a look. And if you read it and it works for you, a short review on Amazon genuinely matters at this stage. There aren't many yet, and each one changes whether the next person gives it a chance.

Volume two is already sketched out. Lucifer's problem, at the end of this one, is not solved.

© 2026 Simon Jenny [Blog (Englisch)](/blog/index.html) [Kontakt](/contact.html)

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