I know this is increasingly off-topic, but boy howdy isn’t there just! Both my undergraduate and graduate institutions were/are just horrible on this front.

When I was hired at the University of Hong Kong, I was eligible for staff housing. Except that at the time, they didn’t have enough to go around, so they put us up in a regular flat (apartment) they were renting on the market, and we paid only the HKU rate. Fair enough, so far.

They were in process of completing some new blocks of staff flats, however, and when they were completed, a few months later, we were required to leave our flat and choose one in the new blocks. The order of selection would be based on the number of “points” you had, which were allocated on the basis of your rank, the number of children you had, and how long it had been since you last chose to move. As relative newcomers required to move, we were reasonably up on the list, but not even close to getting a true Des Res [desirable residence], with a glorious sea view, for which we were severely outranked by incoming full professors.

Well, OK. We could live with that, and in a few years, as attrition led to turnover, our points would accrue and we could aspire to something better. Except that we were officially judged to have CHOSEN this move, thus costing us critical points and dropping us well down the list again, despite my remonstrances to the effect that since we were REQUIRED to move out of our existing flat, it was not much of a “choice” to move into a new one (rather than, say, subsisting on the street).

There’s something about universities and housing that cause logic to falter, wave its little hands in the air, and give up.

FWIW, after we’d gotten our new flat fitted up – and it’s not all that easy when you live in one half of a slice of a cylindrical building – we decided it was too much effort to move, so we wound up staying there for 17.5 years.

Richard – This reminds me of room-draw at the end of my first year in college. We picked numbers that resulted in the order in which we would choose rooms for the following year. Although I didn’t pick the worst number, due to various logistics, I ended up being the last one in line to choose a room. However, there was only one room left. It was an “open double” – meaning that it was a double, but you wouldn’t know who’d be placed in it as a roommate for you – something that is quite undesirable. So I walked into the room to make my choice. The open double was the only room left. I asked what would happen if I decided I did not want to choose that room. I was told that in that case it would be assigned to me. Hah. So much for choice.
[For anyone curious in the final outcome.. fast forward a few months.. in September of my sophomore year no one had been assigned to the open double as a roommate during the first week. A junior with a single never showed up. I requested it and got it ending up with a single. It was tiny, but it was all mine and I was very happy about that.:)]

2. Can someone explain to me why “There is no choice” and “There is only one choice” mean exactly the same thing?

Btw, talking about something funny that’s worth saying once: have you heard about Russian Duma voting to remove ‘Against All’ from the ballot because this guy, apparently, has become too popular?