One properly packed box a week beats phones travelling in whoever's bag had room.
People ask why they cannot send a phone to Malé on Thursday, and the answer is partly the boat timetable and mostly about how things get lost.
The timetable part is simple. Tuesday's boat gets into Malé early enough for the workshop to open the phones that same afternoon, which means an answer by Wednesday instead of Friday. The weekend boat brings them home. Out Tuesday, back Saturday or Sunday, about five days, and in the monsoon a couple more because the boat is not ours and the weather decides.
The other part is the part worth writing down. For the first year we sent phones down whenever somebody was travelling. A relative going to Malé, a friend with a seat on the afternoon boat, a cousin who worked at the workshop anyway. It was quicker and it was fine right up until the day it was not, and then there was a phone that nobody could account for and two families who both thought they had been careful.
So now there is one box. It is padded, it holds twelve devices because twelve is what fits with enough between them, and it does not leave with eleven or thirteen.
Before a phone goes in, four things happen on the counter with you standing there. It is photographed on both sides. Its condition is written on a slip, scratches and dents included, and you get a copy. It goes into a bag with your reference on it, the same reference that is on your booking and on the page you can open from your phone. And then the whole box is weighed and its contents listed before it is taped.
The weighing sounds like too much. It is thirty seconds and it means that if a box ever went astray we could say exactly what was in it and what it looked like, to the workshop, to the boat, to anybody. In four years nothing has gone missing and the condition slip has settled an argument twice, both times in about a minute.
The cost of doing it this way is that a phone handed in on Tuesday afternoon waits a week. We will tell you that at the counter. The booking page shows you which Tuesdays still have room, and if it is genuinely urgent and somebody in your family is going down anyway, we will pack and label it properly for them to carry and charge you nothing for doing it.