Our heater is on the fritz in our building, and we’ve been going back and forth with our landlord on the issue. Frustrated with a lack of response, we authored a letter to the landlord stating our intent to take matters to the next level, and wanted to include a detailed record of every time that we had contacted the building manager.

It seems that AT&T stopped keeping a list of local calls on our local phone bill, so we looked online. Nope. Only “Zone 2 & 3″ calls. We called AT&T to get a list of our local phone calls, and we were told that we needed a court order in order to have those records released. A court order. To get a list of phone calls we had made from our own phone, that we paid them to enable us to make. What’s up with that?

Shouldn’t I be allowed free and unfettered access to my own data? Or perhaps a better question is, do I own that data, or did i just generate it, and now it belongs to someone else? I imagine that if they charged me for each and every local call, they would be obligated to present that data in order to justify their billing (hence the list of Zone 2 and 3 calls). Is there something about the fact that we pay a flat rate for local calling that prevents us from commandeering a list of those calls?