Two morons are trying to measure a telephone pole. They keep trying to climb it and keep sliding down.
Along comes this really big, musclebound shmuck and says, “Hey, what are you guys doing?” The two idiots say, “We're trying to measure the height of this pole.”
The schmuck wraps his arms around the pole, pulls it out of the ground, lays it down and measures it. Then he picks it up, puts it back in the ground, says “40 feet” and walks away.
The first moron says to the other, “What a stupid idiot - we wanted the *height*, not the width.”