My apartment was the exact same way. No batteries! And the damn thing was on the wall right next to the kitchen. Even steam from boiling water would set the thing off. I ended up just cutting the wires.
I have long dreamed of a smoke alarm with a ‘sleep’ function, so that when I, say, dare to turn on my oven, I could smack the alarm when it started beeping, telling it not to go off for the next half hour. In my current apartment, things aren’t too bad (there’s a door between my kitchen and the nearest smoke alarm, and I can close it if the thing is a problem), but in previous apartments, things have been so bad that I’ve just taken out the batteries. I think a sleep function would be much safer.
This happened to me too. It was the dead of the night, and all of a sudden “chirp… chirp… chirp”. Woke me up from a deep sleep, making my heart go from zero to sixty in about .1 seconds. I jerked awake, and tried to figure out what precisely was going on in that short period between chirps. It took me another chirp cycle to determine that it was the fire alarm, and that only one was going off. The next problem was which one of the three possible fire alarms it was. See, there was one by the door of my bedroom, one on the stair landing about 3 feet away from the alarm in my room, and one in the room across the landing, which was another 3 feet. All of these alarms were just out of my reach, and the ladders and chairs I might have used to get one were all downstairs. I had pinned down the problem alarm and was just reaching the point of looking for a blunt object to beat it to bits with when my dad (who also happens to be tall enough to reach the alarms without a chair) came out and disconnected it (He fixed it the next morning, no worries).
When my family and I would go camping, we always had a problem with the smoke alarm in our trailer going off for the littlest thing, such as making eggs, toast, etc. Our solution was to take the thing down, take out it’s batteries, and store the whole lot in a drawer.