January 9, 1994

AS expected, they cut me off. When my phone went dead last Sunday, the same day I grumbled in this column about the banal, grinding struggle to get new service in the first place, I felt relieved. I wasn't paranoid. I had waited 10 days for a phone installer. Then I suffered through 36 hours more of misinformation, bureaucratic shuffling and inconvenience before I heard a dial tone.

IN 1993, value continued to be the watchword for diners in New Jersey, and alert restaurateurs took heed. Although a few establishments still charged top dollar, others lowered their prices without jeopardizing quality. Several restaurants offered fixed-price or pretheater menus, or out-and-out discounts under other guises to lure back recession-wary diners who had retreated to their own kitchens.

It may not be immediately apparent to anyone who has not recently taken a close look at the pumps at filling stations, but since Jan. 1, the Government has required that diesel fuel be sold in three colors. The colors are part of a new effort by two Federal agencies and Congress to clean the air and collect fuel taxes. For the Government, it is simpler. For everyone else, it is far more confusing.

It was Small Business Day at the Fordham Road branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank. The bank, once run by David Rockfeller, is trying to find new customers among the shopkeepers and small-factory owners in lower-income areas. Millie Peartree was the first person on line this bright day in December. A director of the Christ Jesus Baptist Church in the Bronx, her congregation, founded a year ago, wanted to buy a brownstone from New York City so it could stop meeting in the Pastor's house.

The Energy Department, the nation's keeper of nuclear arms and enigmas, is seeking to revamp or dismantle the legal machinery that has amassed at least 32 million pages of secrets, a stack that would rise three miles high. Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary says the legal framework behind decades of nuclear secrecy, the Atomic Energy Act, which was adopted in 1946 and revised in 1954, is obsolete and should be overhauled.