[Butch Cassidy Slept Here]

One could argue that the customer in question, in his drunken state, was just trying to impress the OP (obviously, unsuccessfully) with a lie that he was a Delta employee. Such a statement could have been a ploy to get use of the OP's laptop. For a real Delta employee being drunk, in-flight, would have been (or should have been) job suicide assuming the crew was aware that said customer was an employee.

On the other hand, was the flight attendant's pre-occupation with the sick passenger the ONLY reason not to become more forceful, than she was, about the issue of using a cell phone in-flight? A flight attendant, who wanted to cut a fellow employee a break, might very well say something like "you know better than that."

It would be interesting to know whether this was a Delta "mainline" flight, or "Delta Connection" (commuter.) About a year ago there was a well-publicized incident involving a Delta Connection flight attendant who, for lack of a better term, was sloppy drunk (as evidenced by videos) and was taken into police custody.