Two years ago—almost to the day—I wrote a blog post suggesting that IT managers should have a solid remote computing plan in place because gas prices were getting so high that it could theoretically be prohibitive for employees to drive to work. The price-per-gallon that prompted this warning? $2.89. (This was all tied in to the avian flu, which at the time was scarier than rising gas prices. Turns out gas costs really are scarier.)

I'd kill for gas to be $2.89 per gallon again. Well, maybe I wouldn't kill. No, I definitely wouldn't kill. But, it sure would be nice.

This past Saturday, while driving my kids to their dance class, my stomach fell as we passed gas station after gas station. The lowest price we saw, in our Central Massachusetts region, was $3.49 per gallon; the highest was $3.56 per gallon. The price of gas has already risen above $4 per gallon on tony Martha's Vineyard. (Good thing I'm not a beautiful person. Although, I guess if I were, I wouldn't be worried about the price of gas.)

In the past, while my kids were in dance class, I would drive around—sometimes aimlessly—and do errands. The last couple of Saturdays I've read (a book from the library) in the parking lot. I'm thinking more carefully about where I'm going and how many errands I can weave into one trip. I'm grocery shopping more efficiently—thinking out meals a week at a time rather than going out to eat because there was nothing in the house. I brought our cable bill down to bare bones. (Goodbye, Showtime and HBO.) I cancelled my gym membership, which, if you saw me, you'd know I wasn't using very often anyway. I'm turning off lights and turning down the thermostat (and grateful that it's warming up here on the East Coast). I've substituted tea from home in a travel mug for my at-least-once-daily Dunkin Donuts coffee. My family's summer vacation this year will be in the backyard. (I just have to convince my kids that it really is fun to weed.)

And, yes, I'm happy for the ability to work remotely on occasion. My commute is about 40 miles each way, so any day I work from home is money in my pocket (or, gas in my tank). There's pretty much nothing I can do in the office that I can't do from home. In fact, almost everyone at my company can now do their jobs remotely at least part of the time. Two years ago, in contrast, there were many people who couldn't because the technology wasn't there. In the confluence-of-events department, Web-based apps are providing users with pretty much any enterprise app, pretty much anywhere users happen to be, and virtualization is poised to extend desktop functionality on any client.

A lot of the changes I have made in my personal life are positive corrections—that is, things I should have been doing anyway. But all of us are also doing more with less—a mantra that IT departments have certainly heard for the past decade or so. Fortunately, technology is making it a little bit easier for us all.