Reminds me of my last Google interview where, upon not being able to conjure up the complete solution to a puzzle solver in 25 minutes, the interviewer's response to my question of "well I thought the interview would be on actually implementing data structures & algorithms as opposed to using DS&A to solve puzzle challenges, do you have any recommendations on how to get better at these puzzles challenges?" to which he replied "yeah definitely study data structures and algorithms." .... like riiight, thanks for that useful nugget of information - I'll be sure to ask for a refund for all that college tuition since I've obviously never ever heard heard of those data structures and algorithms since I couldn't solve a problem in an arbitrary time span. Sorry, not trying to diverge from the topic at hand, but it was the same kind of ridiculous response that is so disconnected from the frame of reference of the question that I couldn't help but share.

I should have had him solve a captcha for me, still not convinced that it wasn't just a reverse turing test.

I can't stand when people give flippant responses to fair questions - I can totally imagine your frustration in your case.