Consider: Not until 20 minutes into our conversation at the Lawrenceville, N.J., headquarters of his employer, Cooper Pest Solutions, do I find myself saying, "Eeewwww.";
I can't help but react that way after White tells me one too many repulsive facts about bedbugs, which hide in box springs to be closer to their food supply - us.
Thousands of the little bloodsuckers can infest our homes and bite us - typically three times per bug per feeding, for some reason - while we snore.
Fortunately, bedbugs don't live in our hair or under our skin. They don't carry disease and they don't fly, either. But that's about it for the good news.
Bedbugs crawl from room to room, or apartment to apartment. They hitch rides on our clothing and can lurk in upholstered furniture, such as movie-theater seats. They can live for up to a year, too.
And though it takes a pair to reproduce, the sight of even one of the little nasties can be sufficient to ruin a person's sleep for a week.
"They're invading your sanctuary," notes White, who lives in Jackson Township, Ocean County, with his wife, veterinarian Jessica Schulze, and their year-old son, Evan.
In 2007, White inadvertently brought home a most unwelcome visitor.
"I woke up with three bites down the back of my arm," White recalls. "And I thought, 'I know who this is.' I flipped the box spring and saw it.
"My wife handled things very well. She said: 'When I come home tomorrow, there aren't going to be any bugs in our house. If there are, we're going to have an issue,' " he adds. "I took care of it."
How to do that is a focus of Cooper Pest Solution's BedBug Central website, and its series, Bed Bug TV.
Inspired by the Wine Library TV online series, White launched the show in 2008. The 70 fast and often funny clips posted on Cooper's bedbugcentral.com have drawn more than 700,000 hits.
"There are lots of misconceptions about bedbugs," White tells me, noting that some people incorrectly believe they're too minuscule to be visible.
Neither is it necessary to throw away, much less incinerate, your mattresses, furniture, and clothing.
Vinyl "encasements" for box springs and mattresses will keep the bugs off. Quick action if you spot them also is strongly recommended.
The guy knows his stuff. No wonder he recently became the resident expert on bugs of all sorts for Infested!
"Jeff's a really engaging talker," Rebecca North, a producer of the Animal Planet show, says via e-mail. "His contribution set the tone of [Season] 1, so it was a no-brainer to get Jeff back to for the second season."
Pretty heady stuff for a guy who had never appeared onscreen outside Bed Bug TV until summer 2010. That was when a Manhattan bedbug scare got him multiple talking-head gigs on New York and national TV, which ultimately got the attention of Infested!
Despite having been on The View, and chatting with Victoria Beckham backstage, White says he hasn't gone Hollywood.
And he's particularly pleased to have set up a charitable event called "Taking a Bite Out of the Holidays."
BedBug Central teams with pest-control companies to eradicate bedbugs at homeless shelters and group homes free of charge. White enjoys participating in these "feel-good" events.
"I also still work in the field fairly frequently," he says. "Pest-control technicians and other bedbug-interested people recognize me, [but] as for the everyday public . . . I have not been recognized."
Yet.
Contact staff writer Kevin
Riordan at 856-779-3845, kriordan@phillynews.com, or @inqkriordan on Twitter.
Read the metro columnists'
blog, "Blinq," at http://www.philly.com/blinq.
