They actually have those. Some are more like stores but a while back (maybe 8+years ago) it looked like a DMV if you needed to swap your hardware out. Long lines and terrible customer service
"Has everyone else here just tried turning it off and turning it back on again?"
I kinda wished there was something like this the other day when my internet stopped working for no reason. "Did your internet stop working around 10 minutes ago too?"
Smoke detectors are so friggen annoying, they have horrible UX.
When the battery starts getting low they always chirp/beep starting in the middle of the night because that’s when it tends to be coldest which makes the battery slightly worse, so you get a horrible sleep and hit the snooze button because fuck finding the right battery at 3am.
Or you take the battery out and it fucking screams at you and continues chirping because it’s missing a battery and maybe you’ll forget and die on a fire while it’s powered down. But it’s 3 am, where the fuck do you find a store selling batteries that’s open?
The new ones are wired in, but they still drain the battery anyways, so they’re even more annoying to replace and still have all the same annoyances.
They say “test weekly” on the detector, so you go to do your test. It waits for you to press the button and then at full fucking volume beeps right at you. Sure, you know it’s loud enough for a fire, but it’s so fucking loud it physically hurts and scares the shit out of my pets.
UL 217 and 268 standards. They have gotten better but there are certain things where the balance of safety, cost and convenience heavily favors the first followed by the second and then the third.
Interestingly (for a certain narrow definition of "interesting"), the standards have been updated in recent years to reflect the impact of convenience on safety. Cooking can produce smoke that reaches the threshold needed to trigger the alarm without being an indication that there's an imminent danger to the structure and residents. When cooking sets off alarms, people may be tempted to disable those alarms while cooking. Some get re-connected afterward, some don't. The result is that because the alarm is effective (annoying), a significant number of homes have fewer active warning devices than intended.
Some nerds conned a lab into letting them light stuff on fire for money without all the legal trouble a casual arsonist might have to worry about. A side benefit of this arrangement is they've collected a ton of data on smoke and fire development with a wide variety of fuels over time. In order to cut down on the likelihood of those annoyance disconnections, devices built to the newest standard should be less sensitive to the type of smoke that results from normal cooking.
Doesn't fix the midnight chirp you're talking about but the people writing the requirements have noticed that human nature is still a factor.
Have you ever gotten through? My guess is that they’ve just dumped you in order to not spoil their statistics. (A call that never gets connected doesn’t exceed the response time limit).