Service encounters sometimes involve dealing with annoying or even threatening customers. Employees are being abused by customers and customers are being abused by service employees. However, much of current research on the dynamics of customer and service provider misbehavior fails to account for and explain incidents of customer abuse. Understanding the causes and consequences of misbehavior is important but not sufficient in advancing our knowledge that makes an impact in service industries. Uncovering the underlying knowledge that informs action on employee side seems to be more critical. Much current thinking reveals the significant role of tacit knowledge - a specific mode of knowing - in explaining the actions that may contribute to service interaction breakdowns. What we know less about is how tacit knowledge in service provision informs practical judgments, which in turn dictate how choices are made, decisions are reached and outcomes sought. By unpacking experience of incidents of customer abuse in service encounter interactions from an employee perspective; our paper aims to address the powerful role of practical judgment in service provision. We will, based on a rich empirical material on service interactions show how misbehavior appear in service encounters and by this elaborate on the underlying structures and mechanisms related to tacit knowledge. Supported by empirical data from service provision where the interaction is conditioned by no or limited service alternatives, we explore how employees experience and act on this kind of incidents. The findings are divided into four categories regarding two qualitatively different features of customer misbehavior, firstly the degree of misbehavior and secondly the misbehaviors direction towards the employee or the organization. On basis of different types of customer misbehavior we argue that the employees deal with misbehavior in distinctive ways. Based on these findings we propose some managerial implications.