What was going on when I was born?

New York City's streets could be cleaner, its fire code better enforced and more arrests made for serious crimes if the Koch administration improved its management practices, according to a private study of municipal services released yesterday. The study, by the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission, said most of the nine services surveyed had shown some improvement in the last year, although it criticized what it said were setbacks in the Transit Authority and the Fire Department. It said both the transit and fire agencies would qualify for ''blooper awards'' if the budget commission made them. On the other hand, it praised the Sanitation Department as probably the best managed agency. The 73-page report said life in the city could be improved significantly if Mayor Koch would ''focus his attention on the serious business of achieving major improvements in municipal services.''

YLA EASON Company cars, special parking privileges and even annual physical examinations are very much in fashion when corporations hand out ''perks'' to their top executives. But the fastest-growing of these perquisites is personal financial counseling, according to the Hay/Huggins Company, a benefits consulting company based in Philadelphia. At a time when many companies are cutting back on perks, this one has grown 37 percent in the past four years. In 1983, 26 percent of the 854 companies in a Hay/Huggins study provided personal financial counseling to some executives. This is up from 24 percent in 1982 and 20 percent in 1981.

DAVID E. SANGER In two weeks Apple Computer Inc. plans to introduce a briefcase-size, battery-operated version of its popular Apple IIe that analysts say could pose a significant challenge to the International Business Machine Corporation's PCjr home computer. The new Apple IIc, the company's first portable computer, will be shown to the public on April 24 in San Francisco. Its introduction, at a base price of $1,295, marks the second major product announcement by Apple in three months aimed directly at I.B.M.'s growing share of the personal computer market; the Macintosh, Apple's powerful and so far highly successful entry against the I.B.M. Personal Computer, was brought out in late January. ''It's going to get exciting,'' said Lissa Morganthaler, an analyst for Woodman, Kirkpatrick and Gilbreath. ''I.B.M. is really going to have to sit up and pay attention.'' The Apple announcement comes at a time when I.B.M.'s PCjr is reported to be off to a rocky start, with many dealers saying that consumers are finding the machine too expensive and, with its small keyboard and limited ability to run other I.B.M. programs, awkward to use.

Each autumn, Brooklyn's Satmar Hasidim begin making matzohs for the coming spring. A clamorous assembly line of 30 women, printed scarves hiding their hair and lace aprons cinching their waists, wrestle with plump wads of dough until the loaves are thin enough. Now and then the rhythm slows for an exchange of gossip or a lesson in technique, but they know they must work quickly if they are to complete the enormous task ahead: producing 100,000 pounds of the crisp, unleavened bread by mid-April. Not too far away, in Long Island City, Queens, the Horowitz Margareten factory is also at peak production. Here, claw-like mixing forks and half-ton rollers do the work, making 780,000 sheets of matzoh a day, or 1,250 a minute. Roughly 60,000 pounds of flour make the 18-minute trip through the works daily, and the factory uses more flour in a week than the Satmar bakery uses in a year.

International The size of Argentina's foreign debt is a mystery. The new Government still does not know the magnitude of what it owes because of incomplete records left by the previous regime. (Page A1.)

Despite ''peace-loving rhetoric'' from Washington, Konstantin U. Chernenko said he had not seen concrete signs of readiness to improve relations with Moscow. ''Alas, the situation in the world is not improving. It remains very dangerous,'' the Soviet leader said, prefacing a gloomy survey of Soviet-American relations to published in the Monday issue of the newspaper Pravda. (Page A1, Col. 1.) World Court jurisdiction in disputes involving Central America will not be accepted by the Reagan Administration for the next two years, the Administration announced. A senior State Department official said the move, which was unexpected, had been taken because of information that Nicaragua was about to bring charges against the United States in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the official name of the Worl Court. (A1:2.)

''We came close that time but no cigar.'' - Capt. Robert L. Crippen. (B11:4.)

The road from ninth grade to senior year would be much more pleasant if it did not pass through life's first Bermuda Triangle, adolescence. The one thing ninth graders at Great Neck South High School have in common is that they are little. As a ninth grader, Scott Currie felt too small to offer opinions. If he had a wild urge, he would go to the school library, put on his headphones and quietly listen to punk rock. His hero was an upperclassman named Lyle who slept in school by day and by night played drums for a punk band in Greenwich Village. Tenth grade is no picnic either. Eric Gordon was completely isolated his sophomore year. ''I felt inadequate socially, I just didn't fit in,'' he said. ''I had a bleak outlook.'' He took contentious stands - announcing, for instance, that poetry was stupid. When his class studied ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' he was shocked to find he was exactly like Holden Caulfield. It happens to 10th graders all the time, his English teacher, Marcia Weinberg, says. Without fail, several 10th graders will tell her privately that they are cracking up, just like Holden. This year, after lecturing on Dostoyevsky and Camus, Mrs. Weinberg also discovered she had a Raskolnikov and a Stranger in class.

On Monday, two events will take place here that are part of a lengthy but nonetheless hectic and intense struggle to secure the City's future as an international financial center matching the influence of New York. Stock exchange dealers in Government securities here will knock a few percentage points off their commissions on deals of $:500,000 - about $714,000 - or more. And more important, any member of the exchange will be able to set up a company to deal in foreign securities at negotiated rates. This will free them to compete for such business with foreign firms here that are not bound by the exchange's fixed-commission rules.

The mining of Nicaraguan harbors, reportedly under the direct supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency, has rekindled doubts in Congress and among some officials in the Reagan Administration about the extensive use of covert activities to advance United States interests in Central America. As details about the mining and the direct involvement of the C.I.A. have been disclosed in recent days by both Administration officials and members of Congress, the operation has become the focus of attention in a debate about the Administration's policies in Central America. The primary concern expressed by Administration and Congressional opponents of the mining is that it has irritated American allies in Europe and risked an incident between the United States and the Soviet Union without a clearly compensating benefit to American interests in Central America. The laying of the mines, in the harbors of key Nicaraguan ports, is said to have begun about two months ago. Soviet Tanker Was Damaged The Soviet Union made a formal protest to the United States last month when a Soviet tanker, the Lugansk, was damaged by a mine as it approached Puerto Sandino on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. Last week France offered to help Nicaragua remove the mines, and Britain told the Administration that it disapproved of the mining as interference with international shipping.

te ''pe An article March 31 on the Food and Drug Administration's decision allowing two companies to sell a medical device, the nuclear magnetic resonance scanner, misidentified one company. It is the Technicare Corporation of Cleveland.

The Reagan Administration announced today that it would not accept World Court jurisdiction in disputes involving Central America for the next two years. A senior State Department official said the move, which was unexpected, had been made because of information that Nicaragua was about to bring charges against the United States in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the official name for the World Court. He said that confidential intelligence reports received last week, as well as some other public signs, led the Administration to conclude that Nicaragua was planning to go to the World Court in coming days. Mining Could Be Issue The United States has been financing activities and reportedly directing anti-Government rebels in Nicaragua, including the mining of waters in and around Nicaraguan harbors. Last week, the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a halt to such activities. Presumably, if Nicaragua sought relief in the World Court, it would be in connection with this activity, the official said.