xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

This comic describes a person with stilts asking cueball to use his phone. Before he can say what he wants him to do with the phone, Cueball immediately knows that he wants to know how to get off stilts.

For someone who has never worn stilts before, the method to get down from them safely is not obvious. We can't see the stilt user's feet or legs in the pictures, and the way to get off them will vary depending on whether they are the type of stilt that is braced by a strap around the lower leg or the type where the stilt pole extends upwards and is held in the hand. Based on Googling how to get down from stilts, it seems that one method for the latter is to use the steps that are built into the stilts themselves, commonly called 'pegs'. These act like a very wobbly ladder and allow you to climb up and down the stilts. Other methods include leaning against a wall, bracing the stilts at the bottom of the wall, and carefully stepping (or, as in the case with the image when there appear to be no pegs, sliding) down the stilts. Another technique is to climb onto (and off) the stilts from a platform at roughly the same height as the (top) stilt pegs, such as a balcony or deck.

It is somewhat surprising that someone has sufficient mastery to walk and stand still on such high stilts, without also having learnt how to dismount from them, as practicing more than once requires getting off the stilts. One might also expect that someone in this situation might seek rather more direct assistance than looking things up on the internet. Randall may be lampooning the widespread tendency in today's world to automatically resort to Google for every query that crops up.

The title text explains that this person dropped their phone and tried to unlock it with the stilts, but ended up breaking their phone in the process. (Presumably, other unlocking options such as voice, fingerprint, or facial recognition were not enabled or infeasible under the circumstances.) When someone is on stilts, it is actually very hard to stand still because the point of the stilt does not provide the forward-backward length that we are used to our feet having. Beginners generally have a much easier time walking forward, because the momentum helps with balance, and risk falling over if they stop. Unlocking a phone with the stilt would require not only staying still near the phone long enough to do so, but doing so on a single stilt, while lifting the full weight of the other and making those precise motions with an awkward blunt tool that has both considerable mass and considerable moment of inertia on a tiny object a stilt-length away. It is no wonder that instead the person ended up putting too much weight on the stilt while it was above the phone, resulting in considerable force being distributed over a very small area of the phone's fragile screen. All things considered the attempt went much better than it could have, since the person did not fall over.

It is also unlikely that a phone touchscreen could even be operated by a stilt. Most work through capacitive sensing, and are unlikely to work with the stilt-ends unless specifically equipped with a cap of material with electrical properties similar to those of human fingers.

Stilts have been used in other comics, such as 482: Height, 1608: Hoverboard, 1663: Garden, 2603: Childhood Toys, 2669: Things You Should Not Do, and 2765: Escape Speed.