But somebody’s got to do them. Take a look at a few of central Iowa’s weirdest jobs.

By Amber Williams

Being a reporter can be an odd enough job, but perhaps never stranger than the day a man approached me holding an “artificial vagina.” What was my assignment, you ask? To find central Iowa’s weirdest, behind-the-scenes, never-thought-about occupations. Needless to say, things got messy.

“Don’t get any on the camera!” the boss quipped as I headed out the door to see how semen is collected from a bull for artificial insemination one morning. It wasn’t the most glamorous assignment, but I was admittedly intrigued. My curiosity led me to a farm just south of Adel called Hawkeye Breeders.

There, Todd Campidilli explained that he is a “semen collector, semen evaluator, shit pitcher, skid load operator, pretty much a Jack of all trades” on the farm, and has been since 1993. Obviously a good, credible source on the subject of what I feared was going to be jerking off a bull, I listened attentively as he explained the process.

“This is an artificial vagina,” he said, holding up a 15-inch, radiator hose in his hands. Inside the tube was rubber lining that was ribbed and heated with warm water, all necessary elements for simulating the real thing, he said.

Bull semen collector

Todd Campidilli works as a semen collector (among other things) at Hawkeye Breeders, which aids in the artificial insemination of cows around the world. The collection tool he and his colleagues use on the farm is made from a radiator hose, called an artificial vagina. Photos by Amber Williams

Basically, it was Campidilli’s job, along with co-worker Dan Haub and others on the farm, to place the artificial vagina over the bull’s penis at the precise time of ejaculation. Fortunately, the task I’d wincingly imagined was not part of the process. In fact, it’s actually a very quick and simple act, and most of the work is done by what’s called “the teaser animal.”

Now, I don’t know what this creature did to earn this job title, but it seems he (yes, I said, “he”) must have messed up pretty badly. But actually, the teaser got his job because of his docile temperament and his strong back and legs. And what a trooper. This guy really takes one for the team. He knows his job, and he’s good at it — though, there’s not much to it.

Campidilli explained that the teaser animal actually has it pretty good. There are 30 of them on the farm, both male and female, which are rotated throughout the week, working through four collections barns. When it’s their turn, the animal teases an average of 30 bulls a day (as many as 75 in the spring) and runs through this process three times before the work day is over, Campidilli said.

The teaser animals only have to “perform” twice a week, and they are all safe from slaughter. They get to live long lives of grazing, sleeping and occasionally pretending to be in heat, led from one stall to the next and mounted by eight horny bulls.

“It takes about two practice tries, and then we get ’em on the third one, usually,” Campidilli explained, as the teaser animal backed his rear end up to the bull.

Indeed, the third one was a charm. The bull mounted the teaser animal, and Haub, armed with the very large artificial vagina, interfered just in time to catch the load in the device. It was over in seconds, and the teaser animal was on to the next stall.

This rather ingenious, yet simple-in-design, collection tool was secretly equipped with a tube that ran to a vial. Campidilli pulled the vial out and showed me about 10cc of semen. He admitted it was a rather pathetic load for a bull of that size, but “it’s really more about the age and maturity of the bull rather than his size,” he explained.

“We try to make the process as natural as possible,” Campidilli continued. “It’s all based on natural, instinctual responses, and to the best of their knowledge, they just bred a cow.”

I followed him into a small office in the corner of the barn, where John Haub bent over a microscope next to a case filled with samples they’d already collected that morning. (The men started this process around 4 a.m.). Through the microscope, Haub was checking the quality of each sample — the “live count,” which is the volume and activity levels of the sperm — and, if the little swimmers passed the criteria, the collection is transported down the lane to a lab.

There, each sample is divided into small straw vials, labeled with the name of the bull, the farm, the date and other international codes. Each straw holds about 0.5cc of semen, Haub said.

“Instead of one cow getting this whole collection, we could breed as many as 180 cows with one collection,” Campidilli explained, which is why the artificial insemination of livestock is a lucrative business that’s kept Hawkeye Breeders around for 42 years. “It’s an easier and less expensive way to improve the genetics of the animals quicker.”

The day’s collection is added to about 5 million other straws in the lab (which will go on to inseminate 5 million cows around the world), kept in 50 different liquid nitrogen (at 320-degrees below zero) holding tanks.

Now they are ready for the international exchange through the United States Department of Agriculture. Buyers will pay anywhere from $5 (for a dairy sample) to $1,000 (for rare breeds) per straw, Campidilli said. Typically, one straw of the Hawkeye Breeders’ Angus beef semen is valued at about $25 per unit, which is the most popular breed in the beef market, he said.

“It’s kind of an odd industry to be in, but it’s fairly sought after,” Campidilli said.

Odd indeed, which is why it was a perfect fit for this cover story.

Poo at the zoo

Kathy Cross shows a fecal sample collected from the seals at the zoo. Photo by Amber Williams

While collecting semen from a bull is almost a hands-off process, you don’t even want to know how it’s collected from a gorilla at the zoo. “You have to do it by hand,” said Kathy Cross, who is part of the veterinary technician management team at the Blank Park Zoo.

“It’s a job for the interns,” she laughed. “Or, someone who’s truly dedicated to the species.”

Aaron Stone spends about 30-45 minutes per stall cleaning up after the giraffes at the Blank Park Zoo. Photo by Amber Williams

Sorry to disappoint all of you true weirdoes out there, but we did not stick around for that show. No, the zoo has other shitty jobs to feature, such as one of Cross’ many duties — collecting and examining fecal specimens of the animals.

“I check anywhere from three to 10 a day,” she said. “Every animal in the zoo is on twice-a-year check-ups, depending on who’s due that month.”

For example, the goats have been suffering from parasites since they arrived at the zoo earlier this year. So Cross has been keeping a close eye on their shit, she said.

“I take the fecal specimen and stir it in with Fecasol, a sodium-nitrate solution, for about 10 minutes. It releases any parasite eggs from the fecal sample,” she said, snapping on her rubber gloves. “Gathering it can be kind of tricky sometimes because it’s slimy, so it just goes through your fingers. It makes it hard to scoop it, or it’s runny…

“It can also be very smelly,” she said pulling out a smear of seal manure from the lab refrigerator. “It smells fishy,” she laughed.

“But, it’s essential,” she explained. “We’ve got to do it to make sure the animals are healthy.”

Since she changed job duties at the zoo from being the big cat keeper to working with the vets, Cross has washed her hands of having to be the one collecting the samples. That’s a zoo keeper’s job. That’s where guys like Aaron Stone come in. He tends to the large mammals, especially “the hoof stock.”

When the public visits the zoo, usually it’s on a nice day, and they see the giraffes, kangaroos and other exotic creatures grazing, playing and perhaps even mating — all good, fun things for the animals. But African animals, such as the giraffes, obviously can’t survive winter in Iowa, so they’re kept in large, heated stalls. These stalls get messy.

“What they eat must come out,” Stone laughed, as he slipped his feet into a pair of rubber boots.

He said a 2,000-pound giraffe eats about 19 pounds of food pellets and as much as 15 pounds of hay per day, which translates into quite a pile of poop. Stone’s job is fairly simple. The tools of his trade are essentially: boots, gloves, a hose, dish soap, buckets and a shovel — actually, that’s tall boots, thick gloves, a long hose, lots of soap, large buckets and a really big shovel.

Stone says it takes about 30 to 45 minutes to clean each stall, and the giraffes alone use three large stalls. After moving the animals around (being mindful to keep the male, Jakobi, in a separate stall as the females like to bully him) in order for one stall to be animal-free, Stone begins the cleaning process.

He hoses down the floors and walls, and the waste flows like a brown waterfall into a narrow drainage ditch that runs just outside the stall doors and gets sucked down into a drain, leaving the hard matter behind. That’s when Stone reaches for the shovel. The four giraffes alone fill about two to three large barrels a day with “hard matter waste.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of a dirty job, but it’s something I’m used to doing, so it doesn’t bother me,” Stone said. “How many people say they get to work with giraffes all day when they come to work?”

It’s true. There could be worse jobs — like those of John Krusenstjerna and Lance Berry. Cleaning up after animals is gross, but in a funny way. In Krusenstjerna and Berry’s world, the clean-up is numbing and the humor is lost. These guys know what it’s like to clean the biggest messes, the world’s messes — the kind that stay with you forever.

Crime, trauma and disaster clean-up

John Krusenstjerna got the idea to start his business, Iowa Crime and Trauma Scene Cleaners, from the time he spent as a Marine in Iraq. That alone should tell you how bad this job can be. Crime, like war, can be graphically violent. While we joke about semen and seal poop, this job covers all bodily fluids and more — things the average citizen wouldn’t even imagine.

“So many things we do, you don’t hear about or think about — suicides, unattended deaths, just about everything you’ve seen in the news in the last three years, we’ve probably cleaned up after,” Krusenstjerna said. “The worse of the worse is a house where somebody has been deceased for several weeks. When the medical director removes the body, that’s when we come in.”

Krusenstjerna said he and his crew simply “find the contaminated area and remove the contaminants.” But, the devil is in the details, or rather in the definition of “contaminant,” which involves “blood, bodily fluids, brain matter, skull fragments, bone fragments and intestines,” according to Krusenstjerna.

Removing such contaminates and clearing the area can involve a complete remodel of a room or a house, he said. For example, often the “unattended death” involves a shut-in hoarder whose entire home is a contaminant. He tells a story of a woman who was so far to this extreme that she would defecate into garbage bags and toss the bags into the bathtub because the bags would leak. Needless to say, removing her corpse was not the dirties part of the job.

“We’ll remove furniture, carpet, scrub the walls and surfaces and ceilings. Sometimes we hire a contractor to paint and remodel in order to put the room back to the state it was, or even better, lots of times, because it’s cleaner than it originally was,” Krusenstjerna said.

Aside from numerous certification courses Krusenstjerna and his crew members are required to take, the equipment and tools they use are also extensive and necessary to prevent themselves from becoming contaminated. But it’s not the courses, the equipment, the cleaning chemicals or the horrifying contaminants that make this one of central Iowa’s dirtiest deeds. It’s dealing with the families, he said.

“We have to deal with people during the worst time of their lives,” Krusenstjerna said. “We can’t be getting tied up in emotions or the stories behind it. It’s not that we’re cold or anything, but we can’t get wrapped up in that stuff.”

Lance Berry, Service Masters technician, agrees. With 12 years of experience (three months with Service Masters), Berry admits it’s a job not everyone can do. In fact, his two grown sons attempted it once and it was just the inspiration they needed to go to college and seek other long-term careers.

“They had a new respect for Dad’s work,” Berry said.

Service Masters technicians usually find themselves cleaning up after floods, fires, sewer leaks and mold, he said. Berry tells a story about a recent carpet cleaning his crew took on at a home where the people had a sick dog that was “bleeding from who knows where and couldn’t control its bodily functions,” he said. Another anecdote included a woman whose husband had shot himself, and the bullet shattered the thermostat behind him on the wall.

“The whole house filled with water on all levels because the pipes had frozen,” he said. “Any sewer job is really bad.”

Berry admitted, there have been times when the emotions impede a little, and he “feels bad for the family the most.” Recently, he cleaned up after a house fire that killed a 91-year-old woman, leaving her husband a widow.

“That one was really hard, because we worked so closely with him due to the amount of damage in the home. We pretty much had to rebuild his house,” Berry said. “They had lived in that house since 1942, and he lost everything in that fire, including his wife.

“From day to day, you never really know what to expect, but you try to expect anything,” Berry said.

Often doing a good job means getting a little messy yourself. Some people in the world will never truly understand that, but the cleaners get it — some just on their hands, others in their hearts. Sometimes life gets messy, and it needs mopped up. In the end, these jobs exist because there is a need. And somebody’s got to do them. CV