[satyrnein]

It's the latter, but is there any effective difference, really? Say that lowering their their staff level from X to Y would result in a 15 minute wait for a smaller, undeterred group of callers. Putting an artificial floor for wait time of 15 minutes would mean that (X-Y) agents are sitting idle while callers are artificially waiting. I assume HP would not continue to employee them, since cost reduction was the point, after all. So it seems like the only difference is order of operations.