Dear microscopists, today unfortunately I have to remind you to be more careful and cooperative looking after FILM microscopes - some of you have become quite reckless, and this is creating lost time, bad image quality and other problems for other users: * Please be _*very*_ _*careful with the lenses*_: Someone has just damaged the 63x water immersion objective on Confocal 3, we have to send it in for repair, which will probably cost at least £1,000; if you can't find the focus, try with low magnification first, and go to the edge of your slide, dish or coverslip, which is always easy to see. * When using oil immersion objective lenses, only use a _*small drop of oil*_, and wipe the lens between samples. Recently, microscopes were regularly soaked with immersion oil (in particular on CF4), which went into the microscope body, onto all air objectives and everywhere else. This means that users get bad quality images, and staff spend a long time cleaning microscope and lenses. * The *stage insert for multiwell plates *for Leica confocals had disappeared and was urgently needed for a project; we had to order a replacement, and suddenly it has reappeared - another £450 wasted. * _*Rubbish:*_ Please clean the microscope space after yourself, put all rubbish in the appropriate bin: Lab waste into clinical waste bins, everything else into the normal bins - do _*not*_ through any coffee cups or similar into the clinical waste bins, it costs a lot of money to have them incinerated! * If you spill liquid or break glass, please also clean it up! It's not acceptable if the next microscope user has to spend the first part of the session to clean the space (as happened recently on CF3 with broken glass). If things go wrong and you don't know how best to clean it, please ask. I hope this will help to remind the few people behaving badly what effect their negligence has and do better in the future. Thanks for your cooperation, good imaging, Martin -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Martin Spitaler, PhD* *FILM - Facility for Imaging by Light Microscopy* - Facility Manager - Sir Alexander Fleming Building, desk 401 Imperial College London / South Kensington Exhibition Road London SW7 2AZ UK Tel. +44-(0)20-759-42023 E-mail m.spitaler@imperial.ac.uk <mailto:m.spitaler@imperial.ac.uk> Website: http://imperial.ac.uk/imagingfacility