All you have to do to not break something, generally speaking, is to not touch it. By a similar standard, I haven't shocked myself on the flyback transformer on a CRT in almost two decades. The fact that I haven't cracked open a CRT in nearly that long might have something to do with that.
Had he done that, he would have been fired the instant the passwords hit the paper. The only reason he remained employed for so long is because no one else knew the passwords. He was, in essence, blackmailing the city. They tolerated him because he did actually keep the network running. I don't know what the last straw was that has brought us to today's farce.
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Edison