This wasn't an Ames job, but I had a job in an Iowa motor home factory (not Winnebago; smaller than that) where I was a stock clerk and shipping and receiving clerk. One of my jobs was to wander the factory, looking for parts that dealers had ordered and ship them. So it might look to the casual eye like I wasn't doing anything when I was wandering the factory, talking to workers who would know where their parts were better than I would.
Well, we got a new quality control inspector, who I ran into all the time when I was out finding parts. He wasn't my boss, he wasn't anyone's boss. He was just an a$$hole. He took an instant disliking to me for some reason. It might have been because he often wandered into the stockroom, which he was not supposed to do, but was supposed to ask one of us who manned the stockroom for the part or tool or tool repair he needed. One day, when, unbeknownst to me, he wandered into the stockroom, I had to leave to get a part out in the factory to ship it off and the rule is to lock the stockroom door when you leave if you're the only one there. I didn't know he was in there, cause he snuck in and he wasn't supposed to be there, so I locked it.
I was gone maybe 10-15 minutes and when I came back, he was literally red in the face yelling, trying to climb the wire fence that surrounded the stock room. I told him as I unlocked the door that maybe that'll teach you to not sneak into the stockroom and to ask somebody for what you want next time. I was on his $hitlist from then on, even though he's the one who did something wrong.
Well, as often happens, when our plant manager retired, they promoted the a$$hole to replace him. This guy now thought he had me by the short hairs and started ordering me around, telling me to do things that were not in my job description. One thing he did not know was that he STILL was not my boss. My boss worked in the office. He was the lead salesman and CFO of the company, who took all the orders from dealers.
One day, I had a backlog of orders and I was busy trying to fill them. Some orders (like sheet metal for siding on motor homes) required me to build these long narrow boxes to pack them in. And we got a lot of orders for sheet metal because of fender benders. In the midst of all these orders, he comes up to me and orders me to do some make-work project that's not in my job description anyway. I tried to tell him I couldn't do that, because I had a backlog of orders I needed to get out. He told me he didn't give a good goddamn what I was doing. He had given me an order and he expected me to do it.
I argued with him some more and he then ordered me up to his office, where he proceeded to threaten me with my job and wrote me up. As soon as I left, I went to the office and told my boss what had happened and that his backlog of shipments would have to wait because I had been ordered to do something else that would take the rest of the day.
He got pissed. He rushed out of the office and told the plant manager that I was under no circumstances going to do the job he had ordered me to do because I was busy filling his orders. He further told him that under no circumstances was he (the plant manager) to tell me to do anything unless he ran it through my boss first, because I was his employee, not the plant manager's. The write-up was rescinded and torn up as I watched while my boss yelled, you can't write someone up for doing their job.
I was trying to hide a ****-eating grin the whole time he was loudly cussing out the plant manager
Suffice it to say, the a$$hole never bothered me again.