I don't think she was sleeping on the job. The article makes it sound as if she was late to work due to sleeping in. Nevertheless, still funny.
When I was a competitor on my college's flght team, we would wake up very early, preflight our airplanes, and all would taxi out to the runway, and be ready to go the moment the tower opened up at 7am. One morning, as the 5 or 6 of us sat at the runway ready to go, there wasn't an opening annoucement at 7:00. So we waited for a couple mins, and took off anyway and started with our practice. At about 7:15, the opening controller (and a good friend of mine) got on the freq, quite out of breath from running up the 5 flights of stairs to the tower cab, finally announced the opening of class D and told all the flight teammers who were in the pattern to fly continuous right traffic with no calls needed (they're used to our routine, so they always had a custom tailored clearance for us, I can give more details of the special clearance if you guys are interested). I asked "Well, did you sleep in or something?" Tower's reply was "Uhhh, no.....bad traffic on the interstate, yeah, thats what it was".
No harm, no foul.