So I kinda ignored advice and kept trying to hunt down a human to speak and eventually go ahold of the actual BA station at SJC when they came on shift. After a bit of back and forth I got them to start providing some information and it transpired that they had, in fact created a world tracer record when I filled out the form at the airport but rather critically they had set the records last name to my first name, mis-transcribed my email address (put gs where there were Ds and Qs - memo to self, use block caps in future, not lowercase!) and set my UK cellphone number as a US number, this meant that every attempt to contact me failed and I was seeing no updates and no-one was referencing the second record I had created myself online after I had been unable to contact anyone to find out why I did not have a tracking number. Had I not got ahold of them to chase and gone to the airport to collect then I most likely would have not seen the bag again until I was back home at some point in the future as neither them nor the delivery company would have been able to contact me to deliver it and they would have not seen the change in address on the tracer record as they were looking at a different record to the one I was updating so I guess it would have been sent back, ultimately, to the address on the piece of paper inside of it.

Ultimately it's a case of garbage in equals garbage out - bad information into the computer system meant i had no chance of getting good information out of it!