If you manage people long enough, you will eventually get tested by just about every kind of employee possible. Some will stick out in your mind as particularly troublesome, but once in a while, one will pass your way that tests your management skills and demeanor in ways you never dreamed of. Yes, sometimes you are forced to confront the Employee From Hell.

The city of San Francisco is dealing with an individual like this right now, and the story in the San Francisco Chronicle has to be read to be believed. No matter how difficult a person you may have in your workplace, my guess is that your problem child pales in comparison to this:

“A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network,” according to the Chronicle, “altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday.”

Prosecutors in San Francisco say that 43-year-old computer network administrator Terry Childs, “who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored. Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.”

In other words, Childs, who has worked for the city for five years, is the only one who now has access to San Francisco’s computer system, and he’s not letting anyone else in despite being arrested and thrown in jail for his actions. And if you wonder why he’s doing this, the answer is simple. Childs is a problem employee who had recently been disciplined for his workplace behavior.

“One official with knowledge of the case,” the Chronicle reports, “said he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him. ‘They weren’t able to do it—this was kind of his insurance policy,’ said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the attempted firing was a personnel matter.”

San Francisco authorities tell the newspaper that Childs’ denial of access to other system administrators could end up costing the city millions of dollars. Worse yet, “Officials also said they feared that although Childs is in jail, he may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.”

The kicker to all of this is that this guy was a highly paid worker, earning “$126,735 in base pay in 2007 and additional premium pay of $22,534, for a total of $149,269.” The premium pay was apparently given because Childs acted as an on-call troubleshooter in the city’s computer technology department.

Terry Childs clearly wins the 2008 award as the Employee From Hell, but here’s my question: How would you handle a worker making nearly $150,000 per year who did something like this? Have you ever dealt with an employee this bad, and if so, what did you do? I’d love to hear what you think, either as a comment at the bottom of this blog or in an e-mail sent to me a jhollon@workforce.com.