When the Maldivian government distributed a case of forty-eight tuna cans to each household before Ramadan, hundreds queued at collection points in the Malé area and some waited for hours. Eligibility was tied to electricity-meter numbers, one case per household. Authorities added distribution sites and later introduced online time-slot tokens to reduce the lines.
A national gift of the country's staple fish still required a way to count households and order collection. The queue was therefore administrative as well as material, linking an address, an electricity account and a family to one heavy box.