One morning last year at around 6 a.m., a man knocked on the door of our office to tell me the Wi-Fi was out. He was homeless, and he wanted to make sure I knew. I did know. Someone from the internet company was coming later that day to fix it and I was writing against a deadline using my phone data.

He told me about another business down the street that used to have free Wi-Fi. Eventually, it put a password on the network so people could use it only if they bought something. After he left, I began to look differently at the courtyard and the public benches outside our office.

People often sit there late at night or early in the morning. I had noticed them, usually looking at their phones but I had never given much thought to why they chose that spot. When I checked the connection logs for our free guest network, I saw that dozens of people were connecting to it a day.

Last week, I left work around 11 p.m. and saw a young man sitting outside. He could not have been much older than 20. He appeared to be using the Wi-Fi, and when I walked out the door he looked startled, as though I had caught him doing something wrong. I nodded, wished him a good night and went home.

An internet connection has become essential to everyday life. Many job applications are online only. So are messages from family, appointments, forms and all the little things a person may need to handle in a day; and sometimes someone just wants to scroll Facebook for a while. I do that too. It has never been an easy life for people who are currently experiencing homelessness and if scrolling Facebook or watching a YouTube video adds just a little bit of normalcy to their life at the end of the day then not only am I honored to provide it but it would seem cruel to take it away.

I do not know why each person comes to sit outside our office and, frankly, I don’t need to know. The people I have met there have always been kind and we have come to recognize one another. Sometimes a familiar face spots me outside the grocery store and calls out, “Heyyy, newspaper man!” And it feels like being part of a community.

When I bought this newspaper, I hoped it would help keep our community connected. I just didn’t realize our Wi-Fi would be one of the ways.