Recovering a runaway console

Sometimes a program dies leaving your console in a totally unusable state. All you see is a bunch of random numbers and unreadable characters like this.
Instead of seeing a normal console with a blinking cursor and bash prompt like this.

Don't worry, the solution is rather very simple. So, the next time your console goes haywire like this, just type reset (the console won't display what you are typing, since its still in an abnormal state) and press enter. Voila, the console is reinitialized and back in its normal state.

The reset command is the little brother of tset (terminal settings) command and is provided by ncurses-bin package.