I’ve spent fifteen years on the wrong side of a failed run, and the pattern is always the same: the instrument gets blamed first, the method second, and the consumable last, when in my experience the consumable is the culprit more often than the two combined. This article is the field manual I wish someone had handed me in year one: what actually fails in daily analytical work, why it fails, and the concrete numbers and habits that keep it from failing again.
Most failures that reach m...