SEND IT, WEND IT IN A BOX

Talk about jumping between extremes.

Last year at this time Nelson Silva worked installing cabinets, a job that nearly ground to a halt as the local real estate market sunk.

"It was bad, really bad," said Silva, 31, of Las Vegas. "Three months without anything, one week of work."

This Christmas season, having landed a job as a delivery driver for United Parcel Service, Silva is having no trouble staying busy.

He's slinging as many as 250 packages a day heading into the busiest shipping week of the year, his first holiday as a delivery driver.

"You have to be out there hustling," said Silva, one of about 600 UPS drivers in Las Vegas who will haul a collective 120,000 packages Wednesday, the expected peak of the holiday shipping season.

Worldwide, UPS expects to handle about 22 million packages Wednesday, up from about 15 million on a typical day.

FedEx pegged Monday as its peak for the year and estimated it would deliver about 11.3 million packages globally, up from about 7 million on a typical day.

As online shopping grows, more people are using shippers to deliver presents as opposed to picking goods up from the store. That has delivery drivers spending more time making residential deliveries.

"We go down every street in Vegas every single day," said Don Cuce, division operations manager for UPS in Las Vegas.

Locally, the company hires about 450 seasonal workers to keep pace with the holiday rush. It also rents trucks to augment its year-round fleet and workers start their shifts earlier.

Typically preloaders -- the workers who load packages on outgoing trucks -- start their shifts at 4:30 a.m., Cuce said. But the shifts start earlier as the holiday season progresses, with shifts starting at 1:30 a.m. this week.

Package loaders and drivers aren't the only ones who have to get moving early this week to deliver Christmas presents on time. Procrastinators will too.

People who want their packages delivered by Christmas should have them to the shipper by Wednesday for three-day delivery. If they are willing to pony up for Next Day Air through UPS, they can wait until Friday.

FedEx says the last shipping day to ensure delivery by Christmas was Monday, at least for FedEx Ground. Procrastinators willing to pay for FedEx Express delivery can wait until Saturday, the shipping company said.

Contact reporter Benjamin Spillman at bspillman@reviewjournal.com or (702) 477-3861.