Office Depot Mini Stamp Set Review

Office Depot offers this nice little stamp kit, with plenty of stamp options for the business traveler. The kit is small enough (two inches high, and under 3 inches wide) to fit into a briefcase or laptop carry-bag. Each stamp is already made of either blue or red ink, so no stamp pad is needed. The price is right at under US$12 for the whole kit of 8 stamps.

The Eight Pre-Inked Stamps in this Kit:

• Void
• Copy
• Draft
• File Copy
• Paid
• Faxed
• Rush
• Confidential

These stamps are incredibly useful on the road, for reviewing paper items, marking business travel receipts as logged, organizing miscellaneous paperwork and indicating stages of completion for various projects. It's also easier to keep track of correspondence, particularly with the Faxed stamp.

Since the stamps are pre-set, and pre-inked, it's cleaner on the fingers than having a stamp device that must be set manually.

While not every stamp might be useful for every person's needs, one can assign a category to an otherwise unused stamp (for example, decide that File Copy means "this has been read"). The key to being organized is to creatively use what you have available when traveling.

Along these lines, here are some more creative uses for these stamps:

• Mark packages to be mailed with Rush or Confidential.
• Use the Faxed stamp to indicate phone messages that have been returned, on your various slips of paper, or in organized phone logs.
• Use the Draft stamp to indicate personal papers, as separate from business matters, for instant scannable organization.
• Cover a gift for the wife/kids back home with white hotel room letter paper and stamp it all over with Confidential, or even Paid. :-)
• Doodle with the stamps on planes when stupifyingly bored. For example, you can make artistic designs by stamping patters all over your flight motion sickness bag. Using Rush, Draft and Void are humorous choices.

The biggest beef for the traveler is the kit case. The plastic see-through top basically lifts right off. The whole thing comes apart too easily. In a bag, having the case open unexpectedly will dry out the stamps, not to mention marking everything it touches with VOID and RUSH, etc.

A workaround is using a child or woman's elastic hair band wrapped around the case. A simple rubber band also works, but the elastic hair ties seem more durable in bags getting jumbled around by travel.

Related, on Suite101 -

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