Recently my Google Calendar notified me of a birthday. A birthday of someone I didn’t recognise. Slightly confused, given I didn’t actually put this in the calendar, I double checked who this person was. And at this point, I realised that my calendar is now importing birthdays from Google+.

Never mind – presumably there’s an option to remove this? A quick search online (using google, obviously), and I found just one solution, recommended by loads of people. The solution apparently involves going into your calendar settings, calendars, browse interesting calendars, more, and then clicking “unsubscribe” next to Birthdays. Easy.

Every website I found with a solution to stop these birthdays showing up is the same. And there are even screenshots showing how it works. But it doesn’t work for me.

This is what that page looks like to me:

You’ll notice, that there is no “birthday” calendar to remove. And nothing to unsubscribe from, in case it’s been renamed. Either it’s just something weird with my account or this oft-repeated solution no longer works.

A bit more googling, I found this page:

Really?

Google+ friends are, let’s be fair here – people who I’m either already friends with on Twitter and/or Facebook, PLUS people who I mostly don’t know well enough to be friends with on Facebook or Twitter.

And it seems for those Google+ duplicates/acquaintances, you can hide the calendar from some views, but the only way to remove their birthdays from showing up somewhere in my google calendar is “by removing them from your Google+ circles”? There’s really no other way, except that? I see. Well, in that case, I guess I’ll have to put up with it. Or, call your bluff, Google.

I mean I use it SO frequently (last post, 3.5 years ago), but if you insist. *Deletes all friends from Google+* See you all on Facebook/Twitter instead, everyone.