Future Tense Water Feature Freak Out

Friday afternoon Terry was nice enough to host a small get-together of English teachers-- his wife and kids went to visit the grandparents in Florida so he had the house to himself-- and he specified that this was a"no children" party, which may have offended a few people, but it's really much nicer to lounge in a pool when there are no children-- and we're teachers, we're going to see kids soon enough (and I can barely tolerate adults) and Terry has a beautiful in-ground pool, complete with a rock waterfall water feature spilling into the deep end . . . and I guess it was a serendipitous set of circumstances that led to this incident; I was doing a few laps, some underwater, when Terry was telling a particular story about his rambunctious seven-year-old son Caleb, but anyway, when I surfaced all I heard was "You can dive off the rock waterfall!" and so I got out of the pool a little drunk, thinking to myself "Awesome! I can dive off the rock waterfall!" and I walked over and dove off the rock waterfall and my hands sort of grazed the incline from the deep end to the shallow end, but I recognized that might happen and made sure I did a shallow dive, but then when I emerged from underwater everyone was yelling at me-- they were saying the opposite of what I heard: "Terry just said NOT to dive off the rock waterfall!" and I was like "what?" but I guess I was underwater for most of Terry's story and then when I popped up all I heard was the end of a statement that probably went something like this: "my crazy seven-year-old dives off the waterfall and it's only six feet deep so it's totally dangerous, but he won't listen to me, he's going to break his neck . . . I mean, maybe if you move to the side it's a little safer to dive off those rocks next to the waterfall, but it's still not safe, it's too shallow but if you're as crazy as my son Caleb and you want to badly injure yourself then"-- and here's where I must have surfaced-- "you can go ahead and dive off the waterfall" so I think the moral here is that if you put a bunch of qualifiers in front of a statement, understand that if someone is underwater for the first half of your sentence, they could really fuck themselves up.