  We review our knowledge of the most basic properties of the AGN obscuring
region - its location, scale, symmetry, and mean covering factor - and discuss
new evidence on the distribution of covering factors in a sample of ~9000
quasars with WISE, UKIDSS, and SDSS photometry. The obscuring regions of AGN
may be in some ways more complex than we thought - multi-scale, not symmetric,
chaotic - and in some ways simpler - with no dependence on luminosity, and a
covering factor distribution that may be determined by the simplest of
considerations - e.g. random misalignments.
