On Topic Episode 69: It’s functionING but not fully functionAL

Recorded March 13, 2026

This episode of On Topic tackles “Spring cleaning” by focusing less on tidy closets and more on the grime higher ed AV teams create for themselves. The panel trades stories about delayed refreshes, inherited programming messes, legacy systems that refuse to die, rushed project deadlines, and the temporary fixes that somehow become permanent. Before you get clean, revel in the filth…

It’s a funny, brutally honest look at technical debt, bad design choices, and the institutional rot that keeps old problems hanging around far longer than they should. If your campus has mystery cables, aging systems, and one room everyone’s afraid to touch, this episode will feel painfully familiar. Let’s get filthy!

Alternate show titles:

• Budgets are optional

• Those are sticky weird situations

• Normally I’m shady and gross

• I wasn’t a pro, so I used two plusses

• Good luck, I’m sorry

• Museum of AV decisions

• It did what it did

• Be here when the tree falls on the house

• I feel like the whole university is guilty of this

• Just everybody calm down!

• It’s gonna be… not bad

• If y’all didn’t take an entire month off for Christmas… 

We stream live every Friday at about 315p Eastern/1215p Pacific and you can listen to everything we record over at AVSuperFriends.com 

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