Sounds like so many I know of. The AA ones are always protected no matter how much they text on the job, wear whatever, esp in business settings, send e-mail with all kinds of horrendous grammar and spelling problems, and generally running rampant without fear of reprisals.
At my last company, I was the one who followed the cell phone rule (none), clocked in and out normally, taught and trained techno-illiterates to be useful, only one with a real technical background and an IT cert of two, helped break an employee theft ring by keeping honest records, and never turning anyone away who needed help.
For my troubles, I was told by the head man himself that I was being put in a department to be failed on purpose. It did and I left because of disgust and a couple of AAs got my old job plus weeks of training and the ear of the main manager.
I wasn’t the one with the two decades experience. But I was fired by an AA monkey, who had been promoted to management 6 months after being hired, despite others in front of him (not me, who never had mgmt ambitions.) The company fired 25% of its IT in two years, replacing them with Bangalore people, who’d stay on the job for 6 moths or less, such was competition for their talents over there, requiring constant training from the US side, but it evidently paid off for the company. In a short run, anyway. Who pays attention to anything beyond the next quarter? The company was soon sold to a European firm, which, I suppose, solved their cash problem - most of their cash was parked overseas, and you know the story of American firms not being able to bring back their foreign earning without being penalized for the good deed.