The Hazmat Suit

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Today was a rough day at work. What started off this morning as a typical staff meeting disintegrated quickly into a shouting match between an employee who works under me, and my boss and I. This employee had messed up pretty badly on a situation, and we were trying to coach the employee to ensure that he learned from the situation and would take steps to make sure it didn't happen again. Without going into specific details of the issue, it could have been taken care of in a matter of minutes, but the employee felt he was being attacked personally, and that we were calling his character into question. It went downhill quickly. Sensing that it could get ugly, I ended the discussion and ordered everyone out of my office (including my boss). About an hour later, the employee stopped by my office again, still fuming. This time, his direct supervisor was in the room as well, and he took advantage of the opportunity to let us feel the wrath of his anger. More shouting and yelling ensued, and eventually I got to the point where no matter what was said, or how calmly I said it, the message wasn't getting through to this employee. After a while, I lost my cool and just completely went off on this employee, letting loose a tirade of expletives from my mouth, and letting him know in no uncertain terms that his job was on the line, and if he didn't get out of my office, I would terminate him. I don't know if it was the cursing, the shouting, the threat of termination (or a combination of all three), but I think he finally got the message of what we had been trying to communicate to him all day. And sensing that the message finally was sinking in. I sat quietly for a few minutes, apologized to him, shook his hand, and then offered to calmly talk through the issues. We then had a great conversation for about the next two hours, outlining a personal improvement plan for him to follow to correct the issue that started this whole thing off in the first place. When he left my office, we were good. About 30 minutes later, there was a knock at my office door, and when I looked up from my computer, I about had a heart attack! Standing in the doorway was a man standing in a full-body hazmat suit. I was like, "What the heck is going on?" Then through the mask, I heard the voice of the guy who works across the hall from me say, "It sounded like a bloodbath going on in your office all day today. I just came to clean up all the blood!" And then he pretended to start scrubbing my table, desk and bookshelves. His humorous action was exactly what I needed to end my stressful day, and I burst out laughing! He must have sensed the hostility in the air, and came up with a funny way to try and diffuse the situation. It worked perfectly! (I'm not sure where he got a hazmat suit though) I took a picture of the guy in his hazmat suit and sent it to the employee I had been arguing with all day, along with a quick message: "HR is here to clean up the body parts from our battle today!" He quickly responded "Is one hazmat guy enough to clean up our mess?" which told me that everything was good now, and we all could laugh at what had been a very rough day. How have you diffused tense situations at work?