In the single, fluid motion of someone who's done the routine a million times, Dave Burningham slides his UPS truck to a stop, turns the key, undoes his seat belt, slides open the heavy side door and strides briskly to the back of the truck.

It's 9:24 a.m. and 22 degrees, and Burningham, 48, is at the South Central offices of Montana Marketing at 6th and Davis, his first delivery stop of the day. The manifest says he has 13 packages to leave inside the door of the promotional products business.

He's met with a smile and a few sentences of friendly chit-chat, but he never stands still. Roll in the hand cart, stack the boxes, scan each one, back outside for the next load.

Once they're all scanned, it's back in the truck, door shut, seat belt on, ignition turned, and with a quick tap of the horn as he backs up, Burningham is on his way to the next stop.

Work days can run 12 hours long during the holidays for the guys in the brown uniforms, and Burningham rarely, if ever, stops moving.

The packages Burningham dropped off at the first of his 103 stops today arrived in Helena five hours ago, most on a hauler from Billings. They were just 13 out of more than 5,000 parcels scheduled for delivery out of the Helena center on a typical December day. The holiday rush has begun, but hasn't reached its peak: a Monday in July might include 3,000 deliveries, while the days closer to Christmas will bring more than 7,000 parcels to the Helena area.

On-road supervisor Mike Mulcahy drove for eight years before joining management. He points out several new efficiencies in the way packages go from tractor-trailer to delivery car, starting with a new $107,000 adjustable conveyor belt that can extend deep into the truck and be raised and lowered so packages can begin the final leg of their journey to the doorstep as quickly as possible.

The hauler itself is scanned upon arrival, and that scan simultaneously updates the status of every package on board within the company's massive tracking system. Then, each package is scanned again as it eases down a broad belt between the local center's army of delivery cars.

"That scanning system does two things," Mulcahy says. "It tells the pre-loaders where to load everything (on the delivery trucks), and it sends the information in the data management system for the drivers."

The trucks are loaded each morning between 4 and 8:30, and the drivers hit the road at 9.

The delivery day begins with a three-minute meeting that's part pep talk and part safety reminder, with a touch of holiday cheer thrown in.

"Don't make plans at night -- it's Christmas," cautions Mulcahy. "Don't plan on being done at 6. And if you're going to need help, call the center as early as possible and we'll send someone out."

Burningham gives his colleagues a series of safety reminders, and on-car supervisor Suzanne Willems offers a handful of holiday hints: when you think your tree has enough lights, add two more strings; if a child gives you a handmade gift, make sure they know it's the best gift you got; and "before you go to bed, ask yourself, 'Whose life did I make brighter today?' You know how excited those kids get when they see the big brown truck pull up," she says.

At a couple minutes past 9, the building clouds with diesel smoke as 20 trucks turn over. For most of the year, 16 trucks are enough to handle the local load, but this time of year, the number grows by up to 30 percent.

For 11 months, drivers are on their own, but as Christmas approaches, helpers are assigned to each truck. In early December, nearly half the day's trucks have helpers to expedite the process.

The garage doors rattle open and a series of honks -- safety first -- accompany each truck out the door. The sun, which never gets too high in the Helena December sky, peeks through low cloud cover as drivers pull away from the center, fan out across the city and Helena Valley and take off for points as disparate as Townsend and Lincoln.

Burningham's first daily stop this month is at the Women's Mural, where he unhooks a trailer filled with packages for businesses on the Downtown Walking Mall and Great Northern Town Center. Those areas are normally part of his route, but during the busy holidays, a part-timer delivers the dense pedestrian areas.

Generally, Burningham delivers overnight packages first, then other business deliveries, then residences. Then he makes another loop to pick up the day's outgoing packages, and ends the day at the airport, dropping off the overnight parcels leaving Helena.

His truck, manufactured by Grumman Olson, is utilitarian at best. It's loud enough inside that listening to a radio isn't realistic. The ride may be somewhat smooth from the driver's seat, but from the jump seat for passengers, it's anything but.

It's a sweatbox in the summer, with a translucent roof turning the cargo area into a sweltering greenhouse. Driving with both side doors open at least gets the air moving a little.

And in the winter, the bone-chilling cold presses through both the frozen steel floor and as many pairs of socks as you might think would be enough.

Burningham struggles to decide which extreme makes for a worse day on the route.

"Twenty below is really brutal, but 100 is brutal, too," he says. "I do love my job, but when it's 20 below out, well, everybody has issues going to work when it's 20 below. Fortunately, that's only a few days a year."

And with any luck, those days won't come until January, which Burningham says is typically the slowest time of year for package delivery -- a reward of sorts for the heavy lifting of the previous month.

Even on a compact route like Burningham's, the miles add up. His deliveries take him up Grizzly Gulch and back down Orofino, but other than that foray into the outskirts of town, he's basically confined to the area south of 6th Avenue, between downtown and North Montana. Throw in a few pickups and a daily trip to the airport to get today's next-day air packages on the plane, and he covers around 50 miles a day. The 10-year-old delivery truck he's using today has 350,000 miles on it.

That's nothing -- the drivers who travel daily from Helena to Lincoln or White Sulphur Springs can spend a few hundred miles behind the wheel each day. But Burningham prefers the city routes.

"I like the people, and I like getting out and moving around, rather than the long drives," he says. "It'll keep you active, but it won't really keep you healthy. You have to do exercise, too."

And the people seem to like him, too. Burningham is well-known throughout town, with an outgoing personality that suits the work. He knows not only all the receptionists and proprietors at all the businesses he delivers to each morning, but lots of passers-by as well.

"You get to know people, you care about them, but your time with them is short," he says. "You have all these micro-relationships."

While he's known by plenty of people, Burningham knows more people than know him -- at least, he knows where they live, and maybe what their hobbies are.

"I'll surprise people at parties, I'll be introduced to them and I'll tell them their address," he laughs. He knows who gets medicine in the mail, who orders a lot from the home shopping networks, who enjoys outdoor sports. "And depending on how often they get stuff, I can tell them what kind of items they have on their porch and where I can hide things."

After lunch, Burningham heads south out of town. It's longer between stops out here, and he confidently bounces the truck over the alternately rutted and icy back roads and lurches up the steep driveways that spur from the gulches. He knows which driveways he can navigate and which he can't, especially when the weather gets lousy.

If conditions are bad,

drivers can beg off deliveries and other accommodations are made for getting the package to its final

destination.

Each driver has a say in how the route is completed each day, and the company is always looking for ways to become more efficient. Supervisor Mulcahy said that last year, a massive ride-along study covered every stop on every route, looking for ways to save.

"UPS does huge amounts of time studies," he says. "A year ago, every route got a time study that looked at everything: stop signs, speed limits, right turns."

Every task is assigned an amount of time. And it gets pretty specific. At a single stop with a single package, a driver is expected to stop the truck, turn it off, unbuckle the seat belt, unlock the cargo area, find the package, shut the cargo door and have one foot on the ground in 19 seconds.

Every sidewalk, staircase and elevator has a similar time expectation attached. All those times are fed into the computer system, and an expected route time is compiled each day based on how many packages are being delivered to what addresses.

How he designs and completes his route factors into how Burningham's truck is laid out and filled each morning. When the bar code on each arriving package is scanned, a new sticker is printed including a truck number -- JJJ in Burningham's case -- and a four-digit number that tells the pre-loader on which shelf the package belongs.

Mulcahy notes that the sorting system eliminates the need for pre-sorters to be familiar with every address in Helena.

"Under the old system, guys had to know every address we delivered to and what car it went into," Mulcahy says. "The new system has taken a lot of the training and area knowledge out of it."

That makes it easier to replace workers who leave, who call in sick or who, for whatever reason, aren't pre-loading delivery cars any more.

Burningham's daily package inventory provides a snapshot of the modern world of e-commerce. In his truck alone one day last week, he carried packages from QVC, REI, Amazon.com, Sierra Trading Post, Cabela's, Victoria's Secret, NutriSystem, The Body Shop, Williams-Sonoma, Wine Country Gift Baskets, Harry & David, Omaha Steaks and several more big names in catalog and Internet retailing.

Back from the southern gulches, Burningham begins delivering to the dense residential areas south of Broadway. It's here that the routine kicks into high gear, while at the same time developing a certain monotony: start, drive, stop, unbuckle, unlock, grab a package, lock, deliver, buckle, start, drive ... repeat again in half a block. And again. Turn the corner and do it again.

During his brief drives down the block, Burningham addresses some perceptions -- and misperceptions -- about the delivery business.

He's been bitten six times by dogs, he claims, but only three have broken the skin. The company doesn't insist on delivery if there looks to be a dangerous animal.

"Most of the time they're just trying to protect their owner or protect their property," he says.

And while lots of deskbound business women comment on Burningham's summer fashion (yes, the ubiquitous brown shorts), he claims to have never been seriously propositioned. The fantasies about the delivery guy are just that, he says.

"I've never been approached," he laughs. "I'm kind of a guy that will flirt a little bit, but only if I think it's safe."

It hardly seems there's time for flirting. Throughout the afternoon, Burningham rarely stops moving. But eventually, his truck is empty and it's time to rest.

And get ready to do it all again tomorrow.

Reporter John Harrington:

447-4080 or john.harrington@

helenair.com