That seems a bit unreasonable. How many people have as part of their tests "Put the computer to sleep and make sure we don't accidentally wake it up"? I could understand if they had some hardware or software with that specific feature, but in general, it would be a waste of time.
Well, they now have a business case to write that test. And if I was in test automation there, I'd enjoy working on this one.
And that test could be reduced to "Check if we set up any timers", no complicated sleeping/waking thing.