UPS TETRIS

The ridiculous logistics involved in getting you your Christmas presents on time

So this is Christmas.
So this is Christmas.
Image: Reuters/Carlo Allegri
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It’s Christmas shopping crunch time, and you procrastinating present buyers aren’t the only ones feeling it. The logistics that lie behind all of our last-minute, overnight-delivery Amazon purchases are highly complex. For UPS, an estimated 132 million parcels will be shipped during this final week before Christmas alone. And on its peak pick-up day, December 16, somewhere in the neighborhood of 34 million packages entered the system.

The offices of Animal New York look out over a local epicenter of this holiday-season craziness—the parking lot of the UPS Customer Center in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. For 24 hours, they mounted a camera on the roof of their building, capturing the comings and goings of the fleet of white delivery trucks during one of the busiest weeks of the year. The resulting timelapse video—set, appropriately, to “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”—”plays out like an IRL game of Tetris,” as videographer Aymann Ismail writes on Animal‘s website.

This post originally appeared at The Atlantic Cities. More from our sister site:

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