Uh, you *save* the file, not print it out.
No catch-22. I have paperless records stored on my computer (and its backups) going back ten years.
Many industries are required to retain records going back 10 years. I believe the telecom industry is one of them, but I’m not sure if wireless is under that umbrella.
Many of these outfits, esp. Verizon, will archive off legacy data to tape backups or digital backup libraries. You can call them to request a paper copy of the bill, and they’ll probably tell you it’ll take a week or more since they have to call back the tapes from places like Iron Mountain or SCE, run a recovery job on the tape for your record number, and put it somewhere that it can be recovered by another department.
We do this sort of stuff for medical records here all the time, and we have 2 operators who worked for Verizon and AT&T and had similar processes there.