This applies tenfold if you lived in a country where the are only pirated copies of games and all consoles come pre-modchipped (especially if your game was a multi-language copy with a built-in selector/launcher). I assume the modchips had shit timing, so when the chip was having a bad day I would sometimes have to restart my PS2 for 10-15 minutes straight until it loaded. Sometimes I gave up and came back later to repeat the cycle.
Bonus memory: PS2 is supposed to play PS1 games. So when we got a PS2, on the first day I tried one of my bootleg PS1 games and it loaded fine. After that, it never loaded another PS1 game ever, showing the "please insert PS1 or PS2 disc" error.