A stay-at-home Manhattan dad admits he’s a “dead husband walking” after accidentally putting $1,000 worth of his wife’s clothes in a recycling bag — which his do-gooder son threw out.
Michael Farrah, 48, is now on such a desperate hunt for the missing duds, he posted fliers in his Flatiron neighborhood begging for the pricey clothes back.
“Wife’s dry cleaning went out with the recycling. Somebody picked it up other than Sanitation. Reward given,” he wrote. “Please contact dead husband walking.”
Farrah said the clothes — which included two dresses, one scarf, one skirt and a pair of pants — were meant to be dry-cleaned and were placed in a clear plastic bag. Unfortunately, he put that bag a little too close to the bags meant for recycling — and his 9-year-old son, Finn, saw it and apparently tried to be helpful.
“He brought the dry cleaning down and threw it on the pile with the rest of the recycling garbage,” Farrah said on Wednesday. “I didn’t notice that he took the bag down.”
After Farrah took sons Finn and Elijah, 6, to school, he returned home to retrieve the clothes. “I went upstairs to deal with the dry cleaning,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Where is the dry cleaning?’ Finn said it was downstairs. He told me he had taken it out by accident.”
Once he realized what happened, Farrah rushed downstairs, but it was too late.
“I was heartbroken,” he said. “I was going through piles and piles of dirty bottles. I looked through them all. I even went to the corner and looked in the garbage can.”
Finn, too, was crushed.
“I assumed it was garbage because that’s the only thing I take downstairs,” he said.
When it came time to make that frightening call to mom Maya Draisin, the associate publisher of Wired magazine, Farrah and Finn were both nervous.
“I said, ‘Hey, babe, I got some news for you,’ ” Farrah recalled.
The Farrahs are offering a $200 reward to whoever reunites them with the clothing.
Farrah said at least now he knows exactly what to get his wife on Valentine’s Day.
“It gives me an opportunity to buy her clothes,” he said.