January 5, 2000

It's 8 a.m. on a recent Wednesday on the Piscataway, N.J., campus of Telcordia Technologies, and Jeffrey Horning, one of the company's 11 trouble-shooting computer techies, is waiting for his first emergency call of the day. Mr. Horning knows there will be plenty of problems that the ''help desk'' can't fix by phone. Just because Telcordia's stock-in-trade is technological wizardry -- it provides consulting and engineering services to the telecommunications industry -- doesn't mean the 2,000 employees at this site alone can't become befuddled at a PC's refusal to do what it is told. For them, he is more than just a wizard or, in some cases, a scapegoat; he's also part doctor, part psychologist and always the diplomat.

Stock prices fell sharply in the United States and Europe yesterday on concerns that interest rates will rise higher than had been anticipated. End-of-year tax moves and investing strategies were also cited as reasons. The Dow Jones industrial average had its worst day since the autumn of 1998, when world markets were roiled by Asian economic problems and the collapse of the Russian ruble.

THE best time to leave the stage, the theory holds, is when the audience is clamoring for more. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and a man currently beloved by investors, is about to test that theory. President Clinton yesterday nominated Mr. Greenspan to a fourth term as chairman of the nation's central bank, well ahead of the June 20 expiration of his current term. The nomination, which was surprising only in its timing, was enthusiastically received by stock and bond market strategists who give Mr. Greenspan much of the credit for the prosperity enjoyed by most investors and consumers in the United States.

The managers of the Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance Company's Chicago office know how to butter up the corporate V.I.P.'s. As a holiday gift, they flew a quartet of jazz singers to the Hartford headquarters last month to parade around in Mickey Mouse sweaters and sing Christmas carols to the people who hold real power over their professional lives. The quartet sang for the board of directors, of course. But they also made a special, 25-minute stop in a nondescript room of cubicles to sing for a group that the Chicago managers wanted to please as much as anybody else: the computer help-desk staff.

Sears, Roebuck & Company said yesterday that its fourth-quarter earnings would sharply exceed expectations, but analysts cautioned against characterizing the anticipated profit increase as a sign that the troubled merchant had turned its fortunes around. Sears, based in Hoffman Estates, Ill., will not disclose its earnings until later this month, though it said it expected them to rise by as much as 20 percent compared with the results in the quarter a year earlier.