Even a fake gun will get the real cops called on your ass

I've worked overnights at the convenience store for two years now, and to date have not been robbed. I've had lots of shoplifters, but no actual robberies or robbery attempts. I chalk that up to several things:

1. Police officers are in our store a lot. They get free drinks. Plus, the police department has a contract with us for car washes, so when an officer needs to run his cruiser through the wash they stop at our store. Oh, and also the main police station is, like, three blocks away.
2. One of the local hospitals uses our station as a post for their ambulance crews to cut down response times to the center part of the city. So we've got ambulance crews just hanging out most of the time.
3. We're a busy store. No halfway intelligent robber wants to be interrupted in the middle of a holdup, and you'd have to be just damn lucky to be in our store more than five minutes without somebody else showing up, even during the middle of the night.
4. I'm not dumb. People know I don't have money in the register. Regular customers see me drop money into the safe on a regular basis, and I refuse to take large bills on my shift, and when I open the drawer to make change there's rarely anything but fives and ones in there. I'm also pretty quick to call the cops on people if they're acting hinky. The locals know not to fuck with me.

So I was pretty shocked when tonight, as I was making change for a customer, I looked up from the register to see a guy pointing a gun at me.

It only took about two seconds for me to realize that it wasn't a real robber pointing a real gun at me so his real accomplice could steal beer. Instead it was a real dumbass pointing a gun-shaped novelty cigarette lighter at me so I'd know for sure that he was lacking in mental capacity.

He thought it was funny as hell.

I thought it was a prime opportunity to teach a fucker an important lesson about fucking with the wrong convenience store clerk.

Had I been by myself I'd have pushed the panic button. After all, threatening a cashier with even a fake gun will get you charged with armed robbery, and for those two seconds he had me fucking scared. But I had a trainee with me, so when the dude turned his attention away and put the "gun" back in his pocket I quietly called my trainee up to the register and took the phone into the back room to summon the cops.

Meanwhile, the "robber's" friend had gotten a case of beer and brought it to the register, at which point the "robber" grabbed it and took it out of the store before it was paid for. His friend retrieved the beer and paid for it, which I actually thought was kind of unfortunate, 'cause I'd have loved to have added shoplifting to the dude's list of offenses. It did, however, mean that the cops had that much more time to get there and intercept the drunken idiots, who took off on foot.

The officers arrived in just a few minutes -- just in time to catch the guys as they stopped in a parking lot across the street. Four cruisers, lights and sirens, the works. They had both of them cuffed and were searching them within moments.

Now THAT was funny as hell.

Unfortunately, the story didn't end in an arrest. The cop came over and asked me what I wanted him to do with the guy. He said the most he could charge him with, given that he didn't actually demand money or anything, was unlawful use of a weapon, but that the prosecuter probably wouldn't pursue it. We decided that banning him from the lot under threat of arrest for trespassing was probably the most we could feasibly do, so that's where it ended.

I hope that dude pissed himself thinking he was going to jail. And I hope his friend kicked his ass afterwords for nearly getting him arrested, too.

The good news is that the whole thing didn't scare our trainee away. I think he's a keeper.