My dog travels with my wife and I pretty much anywhere we go. She's a good beast, and is welcome at all our friends' houses, events, etc. I bring a towel with us, and when we get somewhere, I find a quiet corner and lay the towel down. Then I call my dog - "Layna" - over, pat the towel, and say "Blanket". This way she knows that this is Her Place. If she needs to go somewhere, if she needs to lay down, or if I tell her to get out of the way by commanding her, "BLANKET", she knows to go to the towel and lay down on it. There she can sleep, get treats, and be a "good dog". Once in a while, I will forget to put the towel down for her. I will see her wandering around. Restless. Not knowing where her "place" is. I'll notice her discomfort, slap myself in the forehead, and put the "blanket" out for her. Instantly she will settle down and feel more relaxed. Even if she doesn't lay down on the towel, she knows this is my place. This is where I belong. And that comforts her. I don't have a place right now. I've learned this from my dog. When I am feeling out of sorts, can't focus, restless, etc, I will look around and figure out where my "place" is... and will usually find there is something wrong with it. Like this week. Big office reorganization. New cubicles. New desks. And... I was sort of forgotten about. One group knew I was moving, and the other group didn't know I needed a new home, and ... I fell through the cracks. So I have been nomadic this week. Moving between conference rooms, empty desks, empty offices, etc, and shifting around the building as they sort out my new desk. (Which somehow got installed without power, network, or phones wired up.) I'm cool with this. After all, I was a consultant for 10 years, working from coffee shops, coworking offices, customer's lunchrooms, etc. I'm used to this, right? I can go nomadic again! Nope. Nope nope nope. Apparently I can't. I am completely out of sorts. Hopefully I can get some work done today, because I am falling behind... and have no idea when my new office might get sorted out! Grr...
We're moving cubicals in two weeks (while I'm on vacation). My name is on the floor plan, thankfully. I'll be close to a window, a major improvement from my current windowless room. I think I feel much like you do. I need my blanket. I stop most days for coffee. I do enjoy the coffee, but I think part of the reason I keep going is because it feels very comfortable. It's a routine that's my little space. The coffee shop owner remembers me and says hi. The employees remember me. It feels like my place. I've held three different positions at my company. First one I thought "I could see doing this until I retire." Then I wanted a change. Again, "I could see doing this until I retire." Then I couldn't. Now I think "I don't know if I'll do this until I retire, but I do think I could stay at this company for that long." My blanket has gotten a little bigger.
When I was in college I co-oped for a biomedical startup that would totally have given me a job if they hadn't gotten eaten by a larger firm for their intellectual property, chopped up for parts and shipped back to Minnesota. Some of those pieces landed in another biomedical startup, that offered me a "job." Unfortunately they were a cash-poor startup so for three months I was an "engineering technician" rather than an "engineer" despite being one of two people in the entire department with a degree. They had nowhere to put me, and no money to build me anything, so they pointed me at a pile of cubicle parts and told me to build my own. The four walls were different colors and half of the desk was held up by books. The finance manager - of course it was the finance manager - came through my Island of Misfit Toys cubicle with a tape measure and discovered that it measured 9'x6'. This could not do, of course, because the "standard" cubicle size for people who weren't managers was 8x6. He did not order the parts to make a 7x6 cubicle. That would have been fiscally imprudent (never mind that I'd saved them $180k that week by reconfiguring the warehouse). The prudent thing, according to him, was to order the parts to convert my 9x6 cubicle into three 3x6 carrels. So I put his carrels together. And then I ran 200' of CAT5 cable under the carpet back to the machine shop that nobody knew how to use (they literally outfitted a $200k shop without hiring any machinists) and put my computer there. Whenever I heard anyone coming down the hall I'd fire up the chinese-ripoff Bridgeport and make shavings. God damn was that a shitty job.
Ha! My only experience in cubes was my first job out of college, as a manufacturing engineer for Chrysler. I showed up on day one and my new boss said, "I'm really busy and I don't really have time for you, so if you see the boss around [pointed out an angry looking woman], make sure you look busy." I decided at that moment, after being an employee of this man for all of 20 minutes, that I was quitting ASAP. I spent the whole spring and summer making sure I looked busy before returning to grad school in the fall. It was laughable, but also hell due to the boredom. I'd die in prison, I realized. I think there has never been a 6 month period of my life where I've accomplished less.