Unidentified Chromatographic Peak

There’s a peak at three-point-seven time,
It appears in each run, keeps the rhyme.
Standards, blanks, everything,
The signal stays ringing,
And we haven’t identified it’s grime.

Before any sequence would start
The peak was already part.
Consistent at three-forty,
Not the analyte, naughty,
And it never detached from the chart.

The blank is supposed to be void,
But the peak left her paranoid.
After cleaning completely,
The peak stays so neatly,
And the system noise has destroyed.

Kindy looked at this peak quite a while,
It was there before protocol’s smile.
“It was here before start,
It played every part,
And I feel that the peak understands wile.”

Kindy filed that it wasn’t a flaw,
And also filed doubt at the law.
Both positions are logged,
Both minds in her clog,
Which is not how we’d normally draw.

The instrument tech didn’t look,
The service report closed the book:
“System background,” it read,
The peak lived instead,
And quantification never mistook.

The method was validated and filed,
The peak in each injection compiled.
Nothing interfered
With what we had feared,
So “accepted” the system defiled.

The system flush cleared every trace,
Except for the peak in its place.
The following Tuesday run
Brought the phantom back, one
And it’s there in each subsequent case.

Kindy named the peak, but it’s not
In the official record lot.
She knows the true name,
But she won’t stake the claim,
And the archive has filed it as “got.”

The peak and the analyte share
A method where nobody’s aware.
One’s at six-point-two,
One at three-point-seventy-two,
But the baseline’s too busy to care.

Years of runs, years of scans,
Years of cleaning the tanks and the pans.
The peak never shifts,
Never vanishes, drifts,
As if it’s got its own life plans.