Does anyone have trouble looking for things?

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I've been wondering this for a while. I am fine when it comes to looking for things that I've lost myself, but say, when someone else asks, could you look into my bag and grab me this? Or go into this room, look under the table, and find this piece of paper, it either takes me several long, agonized minutes to find it, or I am completely at a loss.

I used to think I was just being stupid, but now I think is may have to do with the AS. I think a big part of it has to do with the object I envision in my mind being totally different from the one I'm actually looking for.

All. The. Time. Oh my goodness...had never actually connected this before, but that may very well be another AS tendency. My mom and Dad used to get so mad at me for not finding what they needed me to bring them that they would yell or huff and puff about it. Would be good to hear if others also experience the inability to follow directions and find objects for people.

Lolz. +1 here.
And it's not just looking for physical items either (though I have many examples of)

I think there's a similar psychology when it comes to looking for information in different ways - I was asked by a friend last night to find some information he wanted (because he had no internet connection) and he was frustrated because I couldn't find it even though he gave me a site addy to look it up, and I couldn't figure out the site... while he was all like "it's so simple just do this this and this"

Me: Huhwhat?

But I found the information... MY way. Eventually.

Funny thing is, I always know where MY stuff is, even if my place is a mess and I haven't seen it for months... I just need to remember the last time I used it in relation to what I see around me / events that happened around that time.

It helps me a lot if I have an accurate mental image of what I'm looking for. Knowing the right color often helps a lot. I often don't get much from people describing a place or thing, even though I can build extensive mental images of structures and machinery myself.

curious if people who answer the OP question might be interested in another question - wondering if it's related in any way:
do you remember places by landmarks or street names ? I'm a "turn left at the white house with garden gnomes" type of person myself.

Yes! I'm so bad at finding things that my family has finally stopped asking me to find things for them (for the most part). I even miss things that are literally sitting right in front of my face.

I definitely remember places by landmarks. I can only name 3 streets in my town, even though I've lived here all of my life.

I am also unable to figure out directions (N, S, E, W) unless I can work out one direction because of the sun and time of day, then I can get the rest, but it takes me several minutes to do this and sometimes I still get it wrong. It seems like everyone else instinctually knows the directions, and will say things like "turn west onto that street and then south on that other street" when giving directions. This is basically meaningless to me. Does anyone else have a hard time with that?

I can navigate by cardinal points fairly readily, as long as I can keep my bearing straight. If I spend some time driving around mistaken about north, I get in a fine muddle, and it takes many correct trips through the area to make it seem un-distorted again. Non-grid layouts are a special challenge, where I like to use a map for planning, as well as memory of the intersections.
I prefer my directions as a series of street names and left/right instructions, with a number on the last block.

I am very good at finding lost things when I have the time, but whenever someone points in a direction and says "Go fetch me that" I have no idea where they mean. I just aimlessly walk in that direction and prepare to get myself yelled at.

As long as I can visualise it I can find it - it's like my brain has a preconceived idea of what the thing I am looking for should look like.

For example, earlier in the week, I went to the cupboard to get a can of soup out. Now I know what this soup looks like, I use it all the time, but the supermarket was out of stock this week, so my wife bought a different brand, different coloured packaging, slightly different shaped can. Ten minutes of routing through the cupboards, no joy - frustrated. My wife just walks up and picks it up pretty much straight away - it was right there in front of me.

It happens a lot.

I was hauling in groceries for my co-op house one time, and, on a whim, wrote "Rold Otes" on the big paper bag before putting it on a high shelf. Sure enough, a couple of days later, I heard one of my roommates saying "Rold Otes. What in heck are Rold Otes?"
His wife replied "You know - Rolled Oats."
Rustle rustle -- "Arrgh!"

One time, I was making jewelry, and lost a little part I'd been working on. After looking for it for fifteen minutes, I realized that I only had twenty minutes invested in it anyway, so I just started making another. I got to the same stage, and had to put it down somewhere safe, it was so small. There was the first one, sitting on a bottle top right in front of my nose, so I "couldn't miss it."

A good rule of thumb for me is that if I spend more than a few minutes looking for something, I should stop just looking, and start tidying up until I find it.

Completely. Streetnames mean nothing to me. The few that I do know are the ones that are super common, but otherwise I go completely off of landmarks and familiar sights. But then I'm screwed that way if I go somewhere at night or from a different direction because then it all looks foreign. Hence my overall sense of direction is pretty much nonexistent.

One time, a guy tried to give me directions based completely on the locations of pubs

Same here. I work in a restaurant and a girl I work with one day had forgotten her purse and called me, asking me to go get it (she couldn't get it herself for another irrelevant reason). She said it was in the alley, next to the boxes. In my head, I automatically thought "Cardboard box". So I looked around there for several minutes without any luck. Finally, I go to her and say I can't find it, only to have her tell me she meant that it was next to the little white to-go boxes. Which is exactly where I found it.

While I don't understand why she couldn't clarify that they were "to-go boxes" to begin with, this happens to me on a regular basis and it is extremely frustrating.

I learned a great trick for this. As I'm looking for say, a lipbalm, I repeat in my head "I can see lipbalm, I can see lipbalm". Then I sort of defocus my attention as I walk around so I'm looking at everything rather than one thing at a time. The repetition seems to prime my brain and sometimes the lip balm jumps out at me.

Interesting if this was an aspie trait.

An item I am looking for is invisible to me sometimes, and then somehow it re-appears.

But if I am looking for an anomaly in a visual pattern then I'm good. Like finding something small that fell out of someone's pocket on a trail or a lawn or someplace natural. Or spotting wild turkeys off in the forest when I should be paying attention to the road.

I love this! I'm going to try it.