Misunderstanding Fiasco

I don't know what it was about today.
But there was something in the air.
As it felt like every customer I talked to was in a impatient/bad mood. The type of mood where they sound snippety when they talk to you.
Considering I usually don't experience that in my morning shifts.
To keep encountering it time and time again throughout my shift was a bit jarring.

In any case.
There was a point, where we got busy on the register with customers.
So I jumped in to help back up the other cashier.

And this lady comes up to the counter.
With a plastic bag. Saying "I have a return."
No problem.
Though I ask her if she wants to do an exchange. To which she says yes.
So I tell her she could go grab the harness she needed to exchange it with and we could do everything all together so she wouldn't need to get back in line.

She chose not to, as her Grandma told her to get in line first.
Whatever.

But the problem was...
Her receipt for the returned item was too old.
She'd bought the harness back in January.
And our return policy didn't extend that far back.

Apparently this woman has been on bed rest (and shouldn't have been out of bed now) due to her having complications in every direction with her pregnancy. As she's having twins and had issues of something tearing.
So she hasn't had the ability to return to the store until now.

So I call a manager over, to see what could be done, and the manager approves me doing the exchange after hearing the reasoning.
Which due it to being so far out from the return policy, I had to have the key to approve it.

About the point I'm finishing ringing up the harness, but not yet paying out the cash.
The woman decides she wants to go grab that new harness and exchange it out.
I thought she was only going to be a minute....
but she doesn't come back.

This woman is with two other ladies. One who is probably the grandmother, another closer to her age...maybe a friend or a mother.
In any case, the grandmother decides that while we wait I can ring up the bag of dog food she has in her cart.
I assume that it's all going onto one transaction at this point.
And again ask if we should wait for the lady to return with the harness.

No.
They pay,
and only after everything is rang up do they realize that the harness return was on that receipt. *rolls eyes*
No big deal.
basically the grandmother now owes the daughter the 12ish dollars that the harness cost.
So they go off to search for the lady who still hadn't returned with the replacement harness.

And I head off back to the department to help my customers there.
I turn around a little bit later.
To see our brand new cashier (this is his second day) giving off the 'help I'm out of my depth signals'
Because its the three women again, coming up to finally buy the harness.

Only when I come over what I hear is.
"This isn't my card it's this guy's card and he wouldn't approve yadda yadda"
What I got out of it is that they used the husband's card and he wouldn't approve of the transaction being what it was and so I would need to return the money that the woman got from the harness onto the card and then return the harness again with the pregnant lady and do the exchange there.

Which would have been easy, only the harness is one of the discontinued ones and so I had to have a manager come up again with the key.
So I made the call.
Only to have the manager never come up.
Which was fine.

Because the middle friend/mother lady realized what I was trying to do and that wasn't what they wanted to do.
So she got really agitated about the whole process.
Saying that no, we didn't need to return the harness, what they wanted to do was to put the $12 on the grandmother's card and then the prego person would pay for the rest of it.

Oh.
Got it.
I told her I'd misunderstood before, I thought that we needed to do an exchange.
But the woman (who aren't very good at listening apparently)
Felt the need to repeat herself like twice more, in increasingly loud and agitated tones about what they wanted to do.
Which I responded with in just as loud tones to cut her off, that that was what I was doing, that it had been a misunderstanding earlier.
But the woman couldn't understand what was so 'difficult' about splitting the payment of the harness.
To which I didn't want to explain to her again that it was because I thought they wanted the money back on the card, that was all, but I could fix it.
To which I did.
The grandmother paid the 12ish dollars, and the prego lady paid the other $5 and they were happily on their way.

*rolls eyes* Ugh.

Only, near the end of my shift. Hours later.
I saw the prego lady back up at the register!
Why?
Because after everything....she'd again bought a harness that was too small and now needed to return the smaller harness and get the bigger size.

Luckily I didn't have to deal with that transaction as I had just clocked out.
But. Gah.
Those three women bugged me. A lot.

Probably because they were treating me like I was some fresh faced high school grad new to the store, when I'd been working there for years. *shakes head* It was an honest mistake guys of misunderstanding the intent the first time. No need to get so up in arms about everything.

-Sarnic Dirchi