While having a "smart home" is cool, I would have never spent the money on it if I didn't feel I had to. I bought my home so that I could care for my mom, and part of that was making sure that I could control it remotely. As her dementia progressed, I worked at home whenever I could but still had to go into the office from time to time for a bit. While at work I needed the cameras, a security system, and remote access to everything so I could keep watch and help out if she ran into trouble.

Likely the most important piece of the smart home puzzle was smart smoke detectors.

Mom had put plastic in the oven... twice... while I was home and had the oven on to cook something, so the worry was that she would turn the oven on and do that when I wasn't home. So I bought Google Nest smoke detectors that would alert me to smoke or fire no matter where I was.

Lately the CO₂ sensors have started to fail, and so I have been replacing the detectors as needed.

Until I couldn't.

All of a sudden, nobody had the wired Nest Smoke Detectors available. Nobody. Except Google's own store. But the problem is that they will only allow you to order one of them. This is a problem when I have two detectors with dead CO₂ sensors and one which had expired.

I finally decided to chat with "Customer Support" to find out what to do.

What followed was my wasting an insane amount of time being passed around while being told to do truly insane things. Including (but not limited to) unplugging the failing detectors and removing the batteries so they'll stop beeping.

Yes, you read that right... YOU CAN SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF NOT BEING ABLE TO REPLACE YOUR SMOKE DETECTORS BY DISABLING YOUR SMOKE DETECTORS!

If I didn't have the complete chat transcript of the bizarre shit Google said from my call, I wouldn't believe it.

Note that at any point in my conversations, all the Google "Customer Support" agents had to do was tell me that they were sorry they couldn't sell me replacements for all my dead detectors and I should buy a different brand so I could stay safe. But rather than tell a customer to buy a non-Google product, they thought it was better to tell me to risk my life and illegally disable my smoke detectors.

I can only guess that wanting your customers dead rather than buying a non-Google product is company policy.

Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be evil?"