That wasn't the best bit. Try having having someone in the organization leave without checking back in his or her code before they left. Guess who's IT department is getting a phone call to manually break the locks. ;)
"Hey, Alex. I saw you've head BasePage.aspx locked since last month. Mind if I work on it for a bit?"
"I still need it."
"Any idea when you'll be done with it?"
"No."
This is what the waterfall model was made for.