You may remember my blog post about the Employee From Hell, a disgruntled computer engineer who had taken over the city of San Francisco’s computer system and denied access to everyone else despite being arrested and thrown into jail with a bail of $5 million.

Well, he’s finally surrendered the access codes to the city’s computer system, but only after a jailhouse visit and chat with Gavin Newsom., the mayor of San Francisco. “Newsom came away with the access codes Monday night after talking with Terry Childs, 43, of Pittsburg, California, who has been held since July 13 on four felony counts stemming from what prosecutors describe as an effort to block administrative access to the network that handles 60 percent of the city’s information, including sensitive law enforcement, payroll and jail booking records,” according to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The interesting thing about this meeting was that it was so secret that Mayor Newsom told very few people he was doing it. “The visit was so secret that the mayor did not tell District Attorney Kamala Harris’ office or police about it,” according to the Chronicle. Newsom decided on his own to accept an invitation from Childs’ attorney, Erin Crane, according to mayoral spokesman Nathan Ballard. “Newsom ‘figured it was worth a shot, because although Childs is not a Boy Scout, he’s not Al Capone either,’ Ballard said,” the Chronicle reported.

And the newspaper adds: “Ron Vinson, the chief administrative officer for the [city of San Francisco] Technology Department, said Newsom hadn’t told him about the jail visit in advance. ‘But we are glad he was successful in getting the codes, since no one else has been able to,’ he said, adding that officials expected to have full control of the computer network soon and to generate new passwords for administrators.”

I don’t know about you, but as a manager, I’m torn about the way Newsom dealt with this. On the one hand, he did what he needed to do and took a very pragmatic approach by meeting with the disgruntled computer tech and getting the codes out of him. Newsom cut through everything and solved the problem.

But on the other hand, did the San Francisco mayor actually set himself up to be held hostage by other city employees who have a similar gripes and feel they can do something wild and crazy because ultimately, they will get some personal time and attention from the mayor? And isn’t that the real reason why he didn’t tell the police chief or district attorney about this beforehand? Chances are they would have advised against setting that kind of precedent.

As the Good Morning Silicon Valley column in the San Jose Mercury News points out, “since the story broke, a clearer picture of Childs has emerged, and it bears a remarkable likeness to one of the stock characters of the business world: the control-freak sys admin who thinks he’s surrounded by fools. The network—which handles 60 percent of the city’s information, including sensitive law enforcement, payroll and jail booking records—was Childs’ baby. He designed it, installed it, configured it and managed it, and he didn’t want anyone screwing it up, so he kept access to himself.”

In other words, Terry Childs was one of those nut-case workers you hear about all the time, and the mayor of San Francisco jumped his own law enforcement experts to deal with the nut-case city worker himself. Yes, he got the desired result, but should he have let the law enforcement system work this problem a little more before getting involved?

That’s what I would have done. What Newsom did reeks of grandstanding by a guy who harbors ambitions of being the next governor of California. I’m not a fan of Newsom, and some of his own past personal behavior has been suspect, including a fling with the wife of his campaign manager.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, you probably view what Newsom did with the control-freak sys admin as being the smart act of a decisive executive. Well, I don’t. To me, it’s a classic example of someone who isn’t patient enough to let the well-established system deal with the problem and instead jumps in and big-foots everyone else in order to garner a little political edge.