To play devil's advocate, had OP not wanted to go home so badly Parkinson's Law would've kicked in and OP may have tried to do things the "right way" which may have taken much longer.
Also if the DB was on-prem, then the latency when connecting from home might have been too high for the hack to work.
Any ideas on what the "right way" would be in this case?
To me the solution seems the most straightforward.
Drop the table from some sort of safe mode, or figure out the bad entry in the table and hex edit the file to exclude it, or find/write some sort of recovery/fsck problem for the particular database flavor in question. Those are three alternatives that come to mind for me, which is to say, I wouldn't have thought to spam the db like that. Neat trick!