A coworker of my husband’s, let’s call him Watson, has some interesting ways of dealing with situations. As a system administrator, he has unique powers.

Two days ago my husband received a support ticket regarding a temporary employee unable to log into her machine. My husband updated her password and verified and he could log in and closed the ticket. A day later, the ticket was reopened with the same issue. This time my husband tried her login on a different machine and true enough, he got the invalid username or password error. He searched Active Directory looking for the temporary employee’s login and found nothing. It appeared someone had deleted the employee’s account.

My husband scratched his head and inquired Watson:

“Watson, did you do anything with Mary’s account?”

Watson: “Yes, the manager requested that I delete her account.”

My husband got the manager on the phone and asked about the situation. The manager confirmed that he created a ticket to have Mary removed from a certain mailing list. As my husband was on the phone with the manager, Watson was listening and became rather irritated and printed the ticket and showed it to my husband. The ticket titled “Remove Mary from mailing list ABC”. My husband said to Watson:

“Watson, the ticket requested her removed from a mailing list, you deleted her entire Active Directory account!”

Watson: “How else was I supposed to get her off that mailing list?”

My husband: “Remove her from the mailing list?”

Watson barked: “Yes! I could have done that!” and stormed off and did not say anything else.