Office manager demands all maintenance requests to go through their ticket system and not verbally, maintenance complies, but what happens when the building floods?: 'I told him they needed to submit an emergency ticket through the portal'

This worker just complied with the orders he received. Is that wrong?

Malicious compliance is a term that refers to when you receive an order that you know is not well thought out, so you comply with it, knowing that it will fail spectacularly, just to prove that you were right by doubting the order all along. This is my explanation of the term, but it is pretty accurate. An example of this would be when your boss tells you not to work extra hours; you comply, and then a crisis happens, and they want you to stay overtime to fix it, but you say you can´t because they previously told you not to do extra hours. Now, this is obviously not a good thing to do, but it does feel good to see the look on their faces when you comply with an order, and it doesn't work in the boss's favor. 

Another good example of this kind of behavior is this story. A maintenance guy whose sole purpose in his job is to fix any problem that the office building may have gets an order not to accept any verbal request than employees may give for damages. There was no clarification about exceptions for emergencies or anything. That's why this employee just did exactly what he was told. When the valve broke and water started flooding the whole building, he didn't accept the verbal notification to fix the issue. He waited until a ticket was sent through the portal to close the valve. That made the entire building's floors and walls get more damage than they should have, which, of course, wasn't a nice thing for the manager that order the no-more-verbal-request rule. 

This manager thought she was changing something for the better; this maintenance worker knew she hadn't, but still complied because it is his job. Then, when everything went down, she had no one to blame but herself. The worker did what he was told, even when it was the worst idea. What would you have done in this situation? Do you think that what the worker did was acceptable?