Ever wonder why your cell phone doesn’t work when you’re in a tunnel? Or on the subway, 100 feet under ground?

Of course not. You have no cell service because you have no contact with a cell tower. It’s basically the same problem as your WiFi signal being better in some parts of your home than in others.

Arianna Huffington, Perception, Reality, and Influency

When Arianna Huffington tweeted from Davos on the the topic of cell phone reception, my first thought was “did this alleged thought leader really just ask that question, out loud?”. But let’s give Ms. Huffington the benefit of the doubt and theorize that she was using rhetoric to send a message to the powers-that-be here in The United States.

Of course, we have various types of radio reception in various tunnels. Cell phone reception is even coming to the New York City subway, if very slowly, and not everywhere. And it’s a pretty simple thing to install the mini access points and repeaters that make this possible. Someone has to pay, and someone has to both cut through the politics and do the work, but the answer is as simple as that: we don’t have cell service in all our tunnels because nobody’s installed it.

Red tape is the issue here. We have so many regulations on so many things in the USA that getting things done is too hard, effecting Influency is a trick of mammoth proportions, and talk all you like about the perception vs. reality issues attached to jobs like getting cell phone reception into tunnels; this stuff doesn’t happen until someone either makes it a cause and follows it through, or just plain runs roughshod over “the rules”.

So let’s go with the positive spin on perception, reality and Ms. Huffington’s tweet, shall we? Sure, she’s messed up plenty, but Arianna Huffington has good intentions and certainly is smart enough that we can believe her cell phone reception question wasn’t really a question at all.

Because I’m me, and like Arianna I have an agenda, other questions and issues pertaining to issues with many perception/reality points jump to mind. Get ready; Influency is just days away from launching for real here at Answer Guy Central, and you’re going to see the divide on issues like Search Engine Optimization in all their . . . well, let’s not call it “glory”; our job is to boost your Influency, and sometimes that can get a little bit ugly.

Can’t wait? Reach me, here.