Bedding and Clothing That Should Be Burned

Remember the story THE VELVETEEN RABBIT, and how the bedding and stuffed animals of the boy had to be burned?  Didn't he have scarlet fever?  Anyway, yesterday, this woman returned a bag (garbage bag) of bedding that I think should have been burned.  She claimed to have just gotten out of the hospital with pnemonia.  I don't know, I never thought of pnemonia as contagious, more something someone gets when an illness goes to ones lungs.  Okay, but anyway, I don't know if her coughing was supposed to make me more  sympathetic or if it was supposed to distract me from what looked like the result of her emesis all over the bedding.  She wanted to keep her own garbage bag, so I had to get another one.  Later, after the return was complete, when the woman was in another part of the store,I must have had an expression of disgust on my face, because another customer was sympathetic to what I was doing.  She commented what we must  have to do at Customer Service sometimes are intolerable things.

Also yesterday, a man brought a pair of jeans from our store that only had a upc on the inner cloth tag.  While the cloth tag did match the one on his receipt, I don't for a second believe he wore that pair of jeans only once.  He claimed the zipper broke the first time he wore the jeans, but when he went to get another pair, I put gloves on to touch them.  The jeans were so soiled with cigarrette dust that they reaked of it and they looked as though they'd been dragged through the dirt and used to wipe out giant ashtrays.   Somebody later said some people probably don't do laundry, they just return clothes to the store where they bought them. I put the gloves back on when the customer came back to the return counter with a brand new pair of jeans..  I thought it was interesting how the man kept telling me about the embarrassment of his zipper breaking.  Did he want me to give him his money back on those old jeans and have the store reimburse him for what happened to him?