The other thing I've run into in a similar context is perfectly performed manual work ("you didn't know about the merge function, so you manually typed the 15,000 rows of data into Excel?" And invariably, after coding it up, no errors found) or reimplementing things you could easily find in open source ("you didn't know about the merge function, so you found a textbook on relational algebra and implemented your own RDBMS in VB macros?" Again, a bug free toy database).

Some people are just smarter/faster/better than the rest of us, but they're no better at reading programming language documentation.