"She thinks she's better than everyone else just because she lives in Esso..."
Esso? There's some place called Esso? I know this is oil country, but that seems a bit much.
I was outside one of my local clients having a smoke, eavesdropping on a gaggle of "Real Housewives of Bakersfield". The woman speaking was late 30's and appeared to be a frequent flier with many of the local plastic surgeons. She was wearing skin tight white jeans and a bolero jacket that was no match for her enormously enhanced chest. Her face was pulled taut and she looked like she was in a wind tunnel.
It quickly dawned on me that she wasn't saying "Esso", she was saying "S.O."... as in "Seven Oaks". Seven Oaks is Bako's manufactured, master planned answer to Beverly Hills. It looks like any of the other recent housing developments, with the same Caliterranean McMansion architechture, except the houses are bigger and undoubtably have more "upgrades". The houses go for around $500K, which wouldn't even get you a condo in the real Beverly Hills. It's considered to be in the "good" part of town, not far from abandoned power plants and oil refineries. That's Bako for you.
Really, people - this whole acronym thing has to stop. I blame it all on that idiotic TV show of years past, "The O.C.". As someone who grew up in Orange County I can assure you that no one ever referred to it as "The O.C.". If someone were to ask you where you were from, you politely changed the topic. It was the decent thing to do. Of course this was long before the area got it's nouveau riche makeover.
Soon the LA broadcasters were referring to it as "The O.C.", and the trend started to spread like a virus. Next up was the low rent areas east of LA in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, which for some unknown reason had long been referred to as "The Inland Empire". Not anymore.... now it's "The I.E."
Oy vay.
And now it's infected Bako. "S.O." isn't the only offender. There are several others. The most egregious is "N.O.R.", which stands for "North of the River". Since the "river" is nothing but a trash filled dry gulch, you'd be hard pressed to know when you ever traveled north of it.
Unfortunately, it appears to be a trend that that shows no signs of abating - I've recently seen "Bakersfield" abbreviated as "B.K." I always thought that was shorthand for "bankrupt".
If the shoe fits...
