What was going on when I was born?

Each year, some 2.5 million people who are outdoors enthusiasts - or just want to look the part - make a pilgrimage to L. L. Bean Inc.'s famous retail store, a landmark in this small Maine town. With visions of down vests, chamois shirts and rubber-bottomed Maine hunting shoes dancing in their heads, most probably do not even notice the sprawling, metal-skinned building that stands unidentified off Route 1, just about a half-mile down the road from Bean's store. But in recent years, this nondescript building has attracted a different kind of pilgrim: corporate executives from companies as diverse as I.B.M. and J. C. Penney, Xerox and Eddie Bauer, Digital Equipment and Time Inc. This 315,000-square-foot building is L. L. Bean's distribution center, the backbone of its mighty mail-order business. From this building, Bean annually sends out 5.8 million packages that contain some 11 million items worth some $260 million, or about 86 percent of its total sales. What these corporate giants have come to study is not merely Bean's remarkable efficiency, but the way Bean has achieved that efficiency: by relying on people rather than robots.

The farm bill now on President Reagan's desk, the costliest in history, is an expensive gamble that America's agricultural troubles can be cured with lower prices and bigger Government paychecks, its defenders and its critics say. It is a gamble, they say, that price reductions for American commodities can stimulate enough foreign buying to reduce burdensome surpluses and provide something closer to full use of the American agricultural establishment - the 2.3 million farms, their suppliers, the railroads that move their produce and the mills and shippers that process and sell it. Even the projected costs of $52 billion over the first three years of the five-year measure are, like those of farm legislation of past years, far from a certainty, many say. For example, current farm programs, which were enacted in 1981, wound up costing five times as much as their authors had expected. Some economists believe the cost has been underestimated for the new measure because, they say, far more farmers are likely to apply for benefits than now participate in Federal farm programs. Although the estimated costs are higher than under the original farm proposal Mr. Reagan made in February, Administration officials have said that the President would sign the bill early this week.

The company that employed a deliveryman accused of trying to sell secret documents to the Soviet Union appears to have violated Government rules requiring thorough destruction of classified material, a senior Federal official said today. The official, Steven Garfinkel, head of the Information Security Oversight Ofice, said the procedures attributed to the Acme Reporting Company of Washington by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for discarding classified documents did not comply with a June 1982 Federal directive. It requires companies and Government agencies to shred or burn unneeded classified material or turn it into pulp. Mr. Garfinkel's assessment was based on testimony by an F.B.I. agent, Michael Giglia, at a court hearing Saturday. Mr. Giglia said an Acme official had told him that the company ''maintains copies of top secret and secret documents in its safe. These documents are disposed of by ripping them by hand and placing them in the trash.''

TWENTY-TWO sets of hurricane lamps have been ordered, and the shopper has moved on to the next item on her Christmas list: gifts with $150 price tags. ''I take it these are people who pretty much have everything?'' the salesman inquires. The shopper nods. ''That's difficult,'' he says sympathetically. ''We can do a dozen wines or a dozen champagnes. Or perhaps a superb-looking decanter.''

A picture caption yesterday in some copies of the Sports section with an article about the Knicks game misidentified a New York player. He was Gerald Wilkins.

The Jets chased the ghosts of collapses past, who started to hover over the winter sky today when it looked as if the playoffs might slip away. Instead, the Jets rebounded after a faltering start in which they trailed early and played poorly. They grew in confidence against the Cleveland Browns and finally produced a 37-10 victory that propelled them into the playoffs as a wild-card team on the final Sunday of the regular season. When the Jets are hosts to the New England Patriots next Saturday at 4 P.M., it will mark only the fifth playoff appearance in the club's 26-season history. It will be part of an all-New York wild-card weekend, because on Sunday the Giants will play here at 1 P.M. This is only the second time that both New York teams have made the playoffs the same year.

The interview got off to a shaky start. Facing each other in faded orange wing chairs, Karl Furstenberg, the dean of admissions at Wesleyan University, asked Lauren Markoe, a senior at the Bronx High School of Science, about her extracurricular activities. Miss Markoe replied in a wispy, little-girl voice, and her answer caused the dean to lunge out of his cushions. ''You're the head of the student strike committee?'' he repeated after her in horror. Wesleyan is known for having more than its share of student activists, but in his eight years in admissions Mr. Furstenberg had never heard an applicant boast of trying to undermine a school administration.

The Midcon Corporation rejected yesterday an unfriendly bid for $2.71 billion made last week by a partnership formed by Wagner & Brown and Freeport-McMoran Inc. and offered to acquire up to 10 million shares of its own stock as a defensive measure. After an afternoon meeting, Midcon directors issued a statement that called the unsolicited bid ''a hostile, highly conditional tender offer'' that would be ''unfair and not in the best interests of Midcon or its shareholders.'' In the statement, Midcon, an oil and gas company based in Lombard, Ill., which recently completed a merger with United Energy Resources, said the takeover bid was too low and of ''questionable legality.'' Frederic Spar, a spokesman for a partnership formed by Wagner & Brown of Midland, Tex., and Freeport-McMoran of New Orleans, said last night that the partnership would not comment on the Midcon action until it had reviewed the directors' statement.

Shoppers poured out in droves to fill stores around the country in the final weekend before Christmas, giving retailers what some called their biggest weekend of the year. Most retailers reported double-digit increases over the comparable weekend last year, while others said their gains ranged from 4 to 9 percent. But with just two days remaining in the shortened shopping season this year, most retailers were uncertain whether sales would exceed last year's for the holiday period as a whole. Through the weekend, retailers kept slashing prices and extending store hours in an obvious effort to offset the unfavorable impact of having six fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas than in 1984.

Having signaled in a Federal District Court on Friday that they are negotiating a settlement of their high-stakes legal and financial battle, Texaco Inc. and the Pennzoil Company find themselves at a critical juncture of the nearly two-year-old case. After months of wrangling in the courts over Texaco's disputed $10.1 billion purchase of the Getty Oil Company in 1984 and weeks of exchanging emotional charges and countercharges in the news media, the two companies agreed on Friday to a limited legal truce and a news blackout intended to aid them in pursuing settlement talks. The recent public posturing and legal maneuvering that often seemed more like a somewhat implausible episode of ''Dallas'' than real life now appear to be giving way to a quieter, if no less important, phase of the tangled case. The talks are expected to be complex and arduous. While the form of any settlement being discussed now is not known, it is widely believed that Texaco will offer Pennzoil certain oil properties. Pennzoil has also indicated that it would like to avoid paying taxes on the transaction.

It was mobbed at Macy's, swarming at Saks. There were long lines at Lord & Taylor and Zabar's was a zoo. It was the weekend before Christmas, and just about everyone, it seemed, was scouring the stores for the perfect last-minute present - or, failing that, something that would do in a pinch. There were some shoppers who seemed to relish this kind of crowd -the kind with people who carry shopping bags from seven different stores - as an essential element of the holiday experience, a necessary excess, like eggnog.

International Winnie Mandela was arrested by the South African police after she defied a ban imposed Saturday forbidding her to enter Soweto, the huge segregated black township near Johannesburg. The order for her exclusion from Soweto relaxed previous restrictions on her activities in force since 1977, which exiled her to the remote town of Brandfort. Her lawyers said he had been taken to detention in Krugersdorp, which is southwest of Johannesburg. [Page A1, Column 6.] Moscow's proposal for a moratorium on nuclear testing is a potentially positive development, some Reagan Administration officials said despite the public rejection by the Administration. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, proposed in a letter dated Dec. 5 that the United States join a moratorium on the underground nuclear testing. [A1:1.]