Curious Question! Employees Rights??

[BigFish]

Say you work at Lowe's......and a customer comes into the store and you are as polite as you can be but the customer is right out of the box an %$%$%$%$%$%$%$ and he begins giving you crap and throwing F-bombs at you and being quite insulting! What would you as an employee do??? Do you sit there and take the abuse or do you have a line that once that %$%$%$%$%$%$%$ crosses you begin to defend yourself and blast the guy???? I had just such an incident happen to me and it cost me my job.......should it be ok for a customer to be abusive, rude and just an all out son of a bitch and you not be able to stand up for yourself???? Curious to hear opinions...I will elaborate more later.